Brad Barrish

Reading about Ben Thompson’s Mac getting hacked, which he uses exclusively for agentic AI stuff, is pretty scary. I’ll definitely be making some improvements to my own setup based on this. He also expressed some of the same concerns as I have about Apple locking things down even further. And he’s absolutely right about it being pretty much impossible to run a Mac headless. Good luck if the power goes out and you aren’t physically able to access it.

Hotness

In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite hot in Los Angeles, but that’s October in LA for you. I went to the farmers market, as I do nearly every Sunday and even at 9am it was insanely hot. I’m sitting in my car in Santa Monica at the moment and it says it’s 101 degrees. My watch say 95, so it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

I distinctly remember going to pumpkin patches in October when the kids were younger and it was always dreadfully hot.

And if the heat weren’t enough, the mosquitoes are completely out of control. I picked up buckets at home depot so I can build some mosquito traps for around our house. A neighbor I was talking to yesterday did the same.

Good lord. This Low performance of “When I Go Deaf” from 2013 absolutely wrecked me. I miss them as a band and still can’t believe Mimi is gone. Low is just one of those bands for me… (h/t Sippy)

My new Apple Watch Ultra 4 got delivered today. I got the natural color with the translucent gray Ocean Band. I had the same setup with my Ultra 1, only it had a white Ocean Band. I traded in my Ultra 1, so that will be heading back to Apple. The Ultra 4 looks exactly the same, though the color is a bit different. I love how it looks and am excited to check out the latest Apple Health stuff.

I’ve been going back and forth on the iPhone Duo. I love taking photos with my iPhone and the Duo’s cameras aren’t nearly as good as the ones on the Pro. I’ve had a Pro since they started making them. I love the idea of the Duo, but it might just not be the phone for me.

Steve Albini worked with Cheap trick on a re-recording of In Color?!

I found out about this unreleased Steve Albini version of Cheap Trick’s In Color from a Threads post and have had it on repeat ever since. Anyone who knows anything about Albini knows he was a massive fan of Cheap Trick. The short story is the band apparently thought the original mix of In Color was a little too polished so they ended up re-recording the album with Albini over the course of a few days. He discussed this in his Tape Op interview in 2012.

A fairly big project for them was rerecording the entire In Color album. At the time, that struck me as a mistake; like a capitulation of “we did our best stuff a long time ago.” It seemed like a mistake, up until they started working on it. Then it seemed like the best idea ever. It was so invigorating and it was so much fun. It was so satisfying to hear them blowing those songs out full- bore.

So far they haven’t released it. I think it was more about them exorcising their demons about that record. I think they felt for years like they’d been carrying that record around and that record didn’t represent them. They just wanted a shot to do it their way. And, once they did, I think it soothed their ennui. I don’t think they feel the need to exploit that; it’s just something they wanted to do.

He also discusses it in a Stereogum interview from 2024.

Now, I’ve never confirmed any of this with the band, but my intuition based on what was going on around the band at the time was that they were in the middle of extricating themselves from a managerial relationship and also from a record label relationship. And that album, the In Color album, had most of their hit titles on it. And so by remaking that album, they created a version of it that they owned entirely and that then they could use, they could license and keep all the money from. And that was a tactic that was later used by Taylor Swift and other people. They were pretty early and pretty on the ball doing that.

That seemed like such a crazy idea. And it almost seemed like a kind of a tacit admission that their later material wasn’t as good. I thought it was a bad idea, and I said, so. Then from the minute they started, I just could not have enjoyed myself more sitting there listening to it, and I’m so glad they did it. If you’ve ever seen them play live, that’s what they sound like. They’re an energetic hard rock band, and their studio record version didn’t, didn’t really bring that across that much.

Wow! I really hope the band officially releases this at some point.

I used Bearable to track a lot of my biometrics and symptoms for about 5 years. I stopped using it consistently in 2025. I fell out of the habit and grew kind of tired of it. Part of it was my own fault for trying to track too many things. This has happened to me many times before. I’ve been suffering from a lot of headaches and migraines lately, so I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of tracking things again. I have an appointment at UCLA next month, so I figured it would be good to get back into tracking things. I wear an Apple Watch and Oura ring, but it doesn’t capture everything and I can’t quickly add tags or notes to my data in Apple Health and I don’t like Oura’s interface for this, mostly because I don’t have a way to look back at it.

I exported all of my data from Bearable and had ChatGPT create a Base in Obsidian, which was pretty simple since the data was already in a CSV. Then I created a template using the Templater community plugin for Obsidian and had ChatGPT create a template to fill in some things that I wanted to track. I then generated an Oura API token worked on a little helper script to pull my data from Oura into the template for the current day in addition to collecting several data points, which I fill in manually. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I do this sort of thing at least a few times a week. It is so fun to be able to go from an idea, even a complex one, to a finished product for myself in a few hours. I feel like I say it all the time, but AI really does democratize working with machines in a way that only trained developers could do. It’s incredibly exciting and so weird. It continues to thrill me and also really freak me out. I definitely have mixed feelings about it. That said, I don’t think it’s going to kill us all. I’ve learned not to bring it up with most people, though I do wish I could have nuanced conversations about it with people in my life.

As I struggle to know whether it’s even worth having a website on which I regularly publish, I made a few small improvements to this one over the weekend. If you read via RSS, you won’t notice anything. If you visit in a browser, you’ll now see a blogroll along the right. The list will get added to over time, but I started with a bunch of my favorites. I also tweaked the header a bit by adding a personal logo beside my name and I dropped the link to my mom’s obituary as one of the main links. I plan to move it to a more permanent place on the web at some point. I also added a now page, which is a bit sparse, but it’s something I’d been meaning to add.