Month: December 2025

White Out! Here’s a blizzard of good links to end the year (i.e. the December 2025 edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter)

The second half of 2025 is done, so it’s time to follow up on what I wrote at the end of the first half of the year.  Having just had a good dump of the white stuff (sleet) all over my yard, I’ve decided to stay warm and dry indoors, make myself a big cup of coffee to sip on, and sort out what’s happened since June. Let’s take a look.

As with the previous edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter, this one is somewhat preoccupied with what is happening in the Trump Administration, though less so. Like the man himself, we are all weary of his presidency, even though he’s been in office a year. (Though technically this is his fifth year as President.)

Other than trying to get a Nobel Peace Prize, he seems to be spending more time focused on his supposed strength: real estate. Of all the things that Trump has done, somehow the fact that he tore down the East Wing of the White House shocked me more than I thought it should.  As some are saying, it is emblematic of his wrecking-ball presidency.  Meanwhile, Trump plows past concerns over East Wing demolition — and envisions an even bigger ballroom than initially planned. The Guardian said the new ballroom is giving off  ‘Dictator-for-life vibes’, although it will be some time before it’s completed, and his plans for the East Wing keep changing. In the meantime, he’s having a go at smaller renos, like the Lincoln Bedroom bathroom 

When he’s not doing damage to the White House, he’s wrecking other parts of Washington, like the Kennedy Center. The Center has seen ticket sales plummeted since Trump takeover. The fact that he’s renamed it the Trump-Kennedy center won’t help matters.

Is he still engaging in extreme corruption? Yes. And not just for himself. The fact this is no longer considered “news” may account for why the media is focused more on other aspects of his Presidency, even though such corruption is a big deal.

As for the new year, could Trump’s tariffs be struck down by SCOTUS? I doubt it. Will he be able to stop the war in the Ukraine? Also doubtful. Will he be able to put the Epstein scandal behind him? Highly unlikely. Maybe he’ll stop using social media in a despicable manner the way he did during the No Kings marches? As if.

Though seemingly unstoppable, it appears 2026 will be full of obstacles for the man, based on the news and these charts examining his year in office. Big supporters like Elise Stefanik and Majorie Taylor Greene are bailing on him. GOP centrists are choosing things like the nuclear option in a fight with Speaker Mike Johnson over Obamacare. It also doesn’t help him that the Job Market is cooling (but not collapsing). More than any other problem he has to deal with though, the key one could simply be his health.

Musk

Like Trump, Elon Musk is someone who we can’t avoid thinking about, even if we want to. His bid for a pay package that could make him the first trillionaire helps to keep him in the news. He still acts like a Big Thinker, throwing out stale ideas like “micropayments”. Let’s not forget his last big idea, though: DOGE. Like the man who came up with it, DOGE was useless in its brief existence. In fact it seems that DOGE ‘doesn’t exist’ despite having months left on its charter.  It’s legacy is that it failed to save any money; all it did was leave refugee children to go hungry.

One of the few ideas that Musk successfully implemented was turning X into a platform that fosters antisemitism. Mind you, Musk is not alone in foster hate: Tucker Carlson’s gave a substantial platform for far-right antisemite Nick Fuentes to share his views. Sadly, we are seeing an ascendence of far right leaders everywhere. For example: In the New Trump Era, the Proud Boys Are ‘Not Apologizing Anymore’ (talkingpointsmemo). Perhaps that’s why Pantone names its Color of the Year for 2026: White. (Technically Cloud Dancer, which led me to revisit this 1979 art work from the Canadian Artists, General Idea: Nazi Milk.)
Mamdani
Among Americans opposing Trump, there’s been one new name that’s been attracting much attention over the last year: Zohran Mamdani, soon to be mayor of New York City. Ironically, he and Trump got along great when he visited the White House, much to the shock of many. For why people — especially young people — voted for him, read this. He seems ready to hit the ground running come January, based on this. Could be an exciting year for NYC.

Canada

Canada has also been opposing Trump. One way they’ve done it is by banning US liquor sales in provincial liquor stores. While the ban has been successful and harmful to some US companies, Canada is left to figuring out what to do with all the stockpiles of US booze.

Ontario also have been running ads in the US using Reagan to complain about the tariffs, leaving Trump angry. I’m not sure Americans ever got it enough, despite it being an effective ad. It didn’t help that the Reagan foundation did Trump a solid on tariffs – at the expense of Reagan’s ideals.

Finally/In other year end news:

The first quarter of the 21st century is over. Time to leap into the second quarter. Mind the gap.

The decline of Starbucks

How is Starbucks doing these days? Well not good, according to some in the media:

And what should you expect in the first quarter of 2026? Key quote:

“Starbucks’ stock has lagged the broader market over the past year, driven by operational, financial, and sentiment-related factors, with the company’s share price declining roughly 10–14% while major indices posted gains. Key factors include persistent labor unrest and historic employee strikes, which have represented the longest and most widespread work stoppages in Starbucks’ history and raised investor concerns about operational disruption, rising wage and scheduling costs, and reputational risks that could depress sales and margins.

At the same time, Starbucks has faced slowing comparable store sales and transaction declines, higher labor and commodity costs, and the financial impact of restructuring initiatives, including store closures and layoffs, under its ‘Back to Starbucks’ turnaround plan, which have weighed on profitability and near-term earnings expectations.”

I thought Starbucks would turn it around as the pandemic declined and companies demanded RTO (return to office). Clearly they have more problems than I thought. It will be interesting to keep an eye on them over the next year.

As for me, I never forgave* them for abandoning so many neighbourhoods like mine during the pandemic, and then returning not as a Third Place but as a Grab n Go place. I now take my money to other coffee shops that did not do that. I suspect many others do too.

(*Forgave is too strong a word, but I said to myself when they closed my locals that I would remember that after the pandemic. By the way, the image above is of one of the Starbucks in my area.)

You might think you want band steering on your home router, but maybe you don’t :)

If you are having problems with your WiFi network at home, it could be a band steering problem. Let me explain.

If you have home Internet and a relatively new router which supports WiFi, it may support communications on two bands: 2.4 Ghz and 5Ghz. It’s also likely that you have band steering. What this means is that you only have one connection point in your network, and the router will steer your device to the appropriate band depending on which one can deliver better performance at a given moment. This piece explains it well.

Normally this is a good thing. But I am here to say that some times it is not.

One of those times happened on my router last week. I was getting terrible response time with my WiFi. I was pinging 8.8.8.8 and instead of it taking less than 30ms it was taking 300ms or 500ms or even greater than 1000ms. I tried everything to reset the router, but nothing worked. I thought maybe some of the older devices were causing the problem on my network somehow. I wanted to put them on the 2.4Ghz band and have my computer joing the 5GHz band, which is something that worked for me years ago. Alas, my router has band steering, so we were all getting lumped together.

Fortunately it was easy to go into the router settings and disable band steering. I did that and created a default connection point and a 5GHz connection point. When I did that, I discovered an interesting thing.

It turns out the 2.4Ghz band range was fine! When I joined it, my response times for my pings were down in the 20-25ms range. However, when I joined the 5GHz band, my response times were terrible again! I don’t know why that is. I suspect there’s a problem with my router. But as some folks like to say, that is a January problem.

So the next time you are having WiFi problems and you have the choice of accessing your network through different bands, consider turning off band steering and see if that helps isolate the problem.

Happy Christmas Eve, 2025


Christmas Eve has always been the best day of the Holidays for me. It’s the time with great anticipation. It’s also when most of the effort of the season has been done, and what remains is Comfort and Joy.

Here’s some Christmas lists – new and old – that you might find useful this year or in future years:

  1. The LCBO’s best bottles of sparkling wine and champagne from Toronto Life
  2. The Best Made-In-Canada Gift Ideas For 2025 from Chatelaine
  3. Tips for decorating — and staying organized — for the holidays from The Washington Post
  4. Chic Outdoor Christmas Decorating Ideas from | Apartment Therapy
  5. 5 Christmas Garland Ideas for Every Room in Your Home also from Apartment Therapy
  6. Nerdy Hanukkah Card from MakeItHackin on Tindie.

Happy Holidays, and Merry Christmas.

 

You might think you want to run your code in a Docker container on AWS ECS vs having it run on a AWS EC2 server, but you are wrong :)

You might think you want to run your code in a Docker container vs having it run on a server. Next you might think you want to run it on AWS’s ECS (Elastic Container Service) because you assume that is easier than going full blown Kubernetes.  Let me try and dissuade you from this and try and persuade you to stick with a VM running on EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).

Last week I wanted to take some code I had and run it on ECS. But before I did that, I did an experiment: I created a dockerfile that was just a simple web site that consisted of a Python Flask app and some HTML files. There was a wrinkle: I wanted the HTML files to sit on a file system outside the container. It’s easy enough to do with Docker and a command like this on an EC2 instance:

docker run -p 8000:8000 –rm  -v /home/bernie/mydata:/app/mydata:ro website:latest

My container listens on port 8000 and any files in my /home/bernie/mydata directory are accessible within the container at /app/mydata

For a container running in ECS, it is an entirely different beast. You have to:

  1. Create a container registry in Amazon’s ECR (Elastic Container Registry).
  2. Make a Docker image and upload it to your container registry.
  3. Create a cluster in ECS.
  4. Create a Task Definition in ECS.
  5. Create an ECS Service, including setting up an ALB (optional), configuring security groups and configuring the VPC associated with the cluster.
  6. Set up an EFS (Elastic File System) to store the HTML.
  7. Set up an EC2 server to create / upload the HTML to. You cannot directly access the EFS you create to the container: you have to mount it to your EC2 server, load the files to the EFS, and then attach it to the cluster/container.
  8. Once you do all that, THEN you can access the simple Flask web site and the web pages you created.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, you have to DEBUG DEBUG DEBUG all through this process. Did you forget to add port 2049 to your security group rules? Fail. Did you forget to set your IAM settings correctly? Fail. Are your subnets set up wrong? Fail. On and on and on.

If you insist on doing it, then I have some useful links below. But if you can get away with a simple micro EC2 server with a simple software firewall in front of it, I highly recommend you go with this approach.

Creating a simple EC2 server? Easy. Having Docker running your container on your server? Easy. Getting your first container running on ECS? Not easy.

P.S. If you still think this is a good idea, then I recommend this: Deploying a Dockerized Web App on AWS Using ECS and Fargate: A Step-by-Step Guide. Deploy a dead simple container first just to work out all the issues you will have with ECS and any other AWS services, and once you have the ability to do that, proceed with more complex containers.

If you want to do it using the AWS CLI, I recommend this repo: Developing and Deploying a Basic Web Application on Amazon ECS Using Fargate.

More good pieces to read: here

P.S.S. Another consideration: while a container running in ECS isn’t too expensive, it’s more expensive than a micro EC2 server. Which is also more expensive than serverless computing using AWS Lambda (although Lambda is more complicated than an EC2 server).

P.S.S.S. I went through this process because the client I was working on had a mandate to deploy code this way. Hence this exercise. The client has good reasons to do things this way: most enterprise clients do. If you are not an enterprise, make your life easier.

Blogging in the AI era

Traffic surge due to AI

Last week I wrote about AI and food blogging. After I wrote that, I got to thinking about my own blog. Above you see my daily traffic, with a big spike happening at the beginning of December. I looked at what visitors were looking at on my blog then: I could see someone looking at a bunch of links beginning with “A”, then beginning with “B”, then “C”, etc. It’s not something a user would do, but it is something a bot would do. I am assuming it is somehow AI related.

It made me wonder why I am still blogging if people are just going to bypass my blog and read it from AI. In some ways I don’t mind: if someone finds my content useful via AI versus my own blog, then it doesn’t matter to me. In other ways I do mind: I keep up a weekly discipline of posting at least 2x/week as much to keep the blog a living thing, but if AI is going to kill off my traffic, then what is the point of maintaining this discipline? Likewise, if I am getting traffic due to AI, then maybe it doesn’t matter to keep posting, since my site will still be getting traffic. It’s a pickle, I think.

I think I will still post because I choose and want to post, but the days of posting to help maintain interest in the blog may be over. Something to consider as I go into the new year.

1984: the year computing changed

The above photo is from a 1984 photo of a worker at IBM in Böblingen. It’s a fairly typical image from then (I know, I was there at that time, though in a different place.) Most of the computer equipment in that room is associated with the mainframe that he’s working on: tape drives (back right), storage (front right), network (front left), consoles (middle). The one exception is the IBM PC behind him.

1984 was the year Apple introduces Macintosh. 1984 is the start of the personal computer revolution that would sweep all that mainframe technology aside. And while the Mac was important in the PC revolution, the IBM PC was just as important.

P.S. I thought of that when I heard the IBM campus at Böblingen is being phased out.

P.S.S. IKEA is currently selling a version of that table, here (the BAGGBODA).

 

On the rise of AI, and the decline of food blogging (and potentially all user generated content)

Food bloggers are seeing a drop in traffic as home cooks turn to AI, according to Bloomberg:

Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.

How bad can it be? To give just one example (from Fortune):

For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

My thoughts on this:

  • There already was several problems in the food blogging area, like too many people trying to make a go of it by writing about cooking. Not to mention that there was a problem with plagiarism within the world of food blogging. Now there is a new plagiarism problem, with AI essentially copying recipes and putting them forward as another source of cooking information.
  • AI plagiarism is not limited to food blogging. I’ve seen the same problem within the IT domain, with vapid sites posting “solutions” to technical problems that are a waste of time.
  • For people and organization that generate content hoping to get people to read it, AI will be squeezing people from both sides. Human generated content with be squeezed out by AI generated content. And with things like Google Zero, search engines will use AI to summarize that content, so that the person searching for information will not go to the next step of clicking through a link to get to another site.
  • Like the person who runs the site Clean Eating Kitchen, I suspect many smaller sites will dry up as a source of content. I think you will then have these aggregators (either Google or large AI generated content sites) plus other quality sites that can still compete, be they cooking.nytimes.com or marthastewart.com or even specialized sites like alisoneroman.com. This is not unlike Travel or Hotel sites that can still maintain a presence even though search engines like Google will scrape prices and present them.
  • Eventually, like all things in IT, there will be a continuing swing towards centralization, until the classic problems of centralization occurs. Then you will have niche sites breaking out again and things will decentralize. Until then, the rise of AI both on the front end (Google) and the back end (AI generated sites) will force out these midtier sites like Clean Eating Kitchen.
  • I am not immune to this problem. I see this site being scraped on the regular, presumably by AI. The good news for me is I write this site as much for me as for anyone else. I am happy if I can post things that help people. However, if some AI site presents the information and it helps people, I don’t care that they didn’t get it directly from me. I still benefit from writing these posts. If I were paying my bills with this site, it would be a problem. But this site is just a hobby for me.

(Image from Pixabay, which appears to be AI generated. Pixabay used to be a good source of imagery, but it has been overrun by AI generated images.  I found this by looking for “ai generated cooking” images.)

Need a book to read? A gift to give? Let the New York Times and I help you

The New York Times recently published a helpful list of 100 books to read (gift link, here). One thing great about that list is that it is broken down into subcategories. Need a book you can read in a day? Perhaps you need something to make you laugh. Or how about a really good memoir or biography? Whatever type of book you need, the Times has guidance for you in one of the subcategories. So instead of staring down a long list of 100 books, you can narrow in on just what suits your reading desires right now.

Books also make great gifts, for those of you looking to get some for the Holidays or some special event. Go check out the list, either for yourself or others. You’ll be glad you did.

Mark Zuckerberg says Social Media is dead (and other thoughts on social media for Dec 2025)

Last year I wrote that Bluesky is making social media fun again, and that was true. It’s still somewhat true: of the remaining platforms, Bluesky and Instagram are still getting steady use from me in 2025.

That might change in 2026 if Instagram starts floods itself with AI content, though. Already I am seeing more and more people posting terrible reels that either are explicitly AI generated or probably AI generated (I’m looking at you, cute animal videos.) Once AI video slop takes over that platform, my Instagram days will be over.

Despite my use, is it true in 2025 that social media really dead for most othe people? In a recent court trial, Mark Zuckerberg of all people says so. It was in his interest to say so in the trial, though. I still believe that the 1-9-90 rule continues to apply to social media: 1% of users create new content, 9% of users will engage with that content, and 90% just consume content. The difference now is the content people consume is not so much from their friends but from organizations and influencers.

As for where they consume it, according to Pew Research Center, most people in 2025 get their content on sites like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Those platforms are also the ones that have seen growth since 2021, according to Axios. Axios adds WhatsApp and Reddit to those sites seeing growth.

The one social media platform seeing decline since 2021 is X (Twitter).  It doesn’t help that X is the go to site for antisemitism, according to CNN. (More on that, here.) And that’s just one of many reasons for people to flee it for twitter-like sites such as Threads and Bluesky.

As for Threads and Bluesky and Truth Social, they just don’t have the juice that Twitter had in it’s heyday. Maybe Mark Z is right: maybe social media as we knew it is dead. Maybe now those social media platforms are just full of people watching TikToks and Reels and Youtube videos, when they aren’t streaming music and video. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

P.S. For more detailed analysis, I highly recommend the Pew report I linked to.

On Gilbert and George, their Southbank Centre show, and conservative artists

Untitled

Following up after the Richter, I also got to head over to London and see Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures at the Southbank Centre. You can get a sense of the show by reading what the Centre says here, but you really have to see their work in person to appreciate both the scale of it and the detail of it. (No matter if I got close or far back from a work, I was always losing something in my photographs, as you can see above.) So see it before it leaves on January 11th.

One thing the exhibit had me look into was the prominence of conservative or right wing artists. These two definitely qualify for that label. But other than someone like Clint Eastwood, I couldn’t think of other right wing artists who were influential.

It seems I just wasn’t paying attention. Reactionary artists are everywhere, based on this list here and here. Of all of them, though, these two English sculpturers (as they refer to themselves) are my favorite.

For more on Gilbert and George, I’ve found a number of other good pieces here and here and here and here. They’re living legends. I’m glad I got to see a major portion of their work at this Southbank Centre exhibit.

On Gerhard Richter at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

Untitled

I was blessed recently not only to be in Paris, but to be there when the Fondation Louis Vuitton had on display a major exhibit of the works of Gerhard Richter. To say “major” is an understatement: it had dozens and dozens of work from every era he has been making art, from the 1960s until now. As a big fan of Richter, I could hardly believe the paintings that they had on display, from Tisch, 1962 to Birkenau, 2014 (seen above). It was incredible.

If you can get to Paris by 02.03.2026, you owe it to yourself to go. You can read more about the exhibit, here. Of course the building itself is fantastic, thanks for Frank Gehry:

Untitled

There’s so much great art to see in Paris, but I’d recommend you check out what the good folks at Louis Vuitton have on display. Before this they had a big David Hockney show too. Have some champagne and cake in the dining area after the show: you’ll be glad you did.

P.S. Here’s a good review of the show with many more images from it too.