Doug Mejia

The beloved ice bream shop served Miami for 20 years. Now, it’s closing.

Wall’s is known not only for its sundaes and seasonal flavors like eggnog and mango but also its homemade fudge. It’s also the place where legions of ice cream lovers took the Great Wall challenge, stuffing down the Great Wall, with 12 scoops of ice cream, brownies, bananas, four toppings and whipped cream. Photos of the proud few who finish made the Wall of Fame.

Today feels like we are saying goodbye to an old friend. It’s always sad to see your favorite places close down after decades of service. My family and I will definitely miss Walls Old-Fashioned Ice Cream shop. We would visit The Big Cheese for some great pizza and football fun, then cross the street for the best ice cream in town at Walls.

My wife and I first started going to Walls during our college days and continued after graduating and starting our careers. We passed on the tradition to our kids, who are also saddened to see Walls close their doors. We definitely had lots of fun and made great memories there. We wish them the best.

Luckily, my wife stopped by today, their last day at their original location, and took a picture to help us remember it.

Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee

I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever. Regulation and global governance are technically feasible, but reliant on political willpower. If we are able to muster it, we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It’s not too late.

Tim Berners-Lee had a vision of interconnecting information through links. He persistently championed this idea until his bosses at CERN allowed him to pursue it. He realized that if people could publish anything on the web, they could publish everything on the web. To make that possible, he had to keep it free or no one would use it and his idea would die on the vine. So he convinced his bosses to relinquish their intellectual property rights and give away the World Wide Web.

Then companies moved in, and something that was free transformed into silos they controlled and eventually monetized. This is what Cory Doctorow describes and labels as the “enshittification” of the web.

First, they offer things for free and draw the consumer in. Then they start selling your data to companies and advertisers. Once those companies become dependent, they turn on them as well. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone except the big players and platform owners.

Now, with AI vacuuming up everything on the web, these resources are being consolidated, potentially making things even worse for Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision. I hope he’s right when he says we still have time to avoid making the same mistake again and prevent AI from further degrading the web with “AI slop”.

A few years ago, I started learning about sketchnoting. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, bought a book on it, and used it for a while. I even collaborated with my local art teacher and passed on our knowledge to quite a few people. I admit, I’m not a very good artist, but the sketches were more than adequate to achieve my goal: to record information and have it make sense to me at a future date. Although I slowed down in using sketchnoting, I still use some remnants of it today. Then, I saw this quick little video on sketchnoting, and now I want to get back into it using my iPad and GoodNotes.

If you’re interested, take a look yourself. It’s a very short video, but very concise and informative.

I am always fascinated to see how things are made or how things work. This is especially true for things that I love, like books. Adam Savage did a great job showing us how old books were made in this video.

BGR wrote a great article on different uses for your iPhone’s USB-C port besides charging. For example, you can connect a wired keyboard to your phone and start using it without any further configuration. Or you can hook up an external hard drive or USB thumb drive to transfer or even back up some of your files while on the go. It might be the faster or only option at times. They even suggested plugging in a wired game controller, but my favorite suggestion was to plug in and charge your low-power devices like AirPods or Apple Watch on the fly. In fact, I have a pretty cool Apple Watch travel charger to do just that. It gets you out of a pinch, for sure.

Not mentioned in this article, but something else I have tried in the past, is plugging in a USB ethernet adapter to connect directly to a network and run a couple of diagnostic tools. Fun stuff. I have also connected USB-C hubs to power multiple devices and even output video over HDMI to an external monitor. I guess the sky is the limit. When in doubt, try it out.

Raspberry Pi 500+ puts the Pi, 16GB of RAM, and a real SSD in a mechanical keyboard

The Raspberry Pi 500 (and 400) systems are versions of the Raspberry Pi built for people who use the Raspberry Pi as a general-purpose computer rather than a hobbyist appliance.

The Raspberry Pi has always been one of my favorite little computers. They’re perfect for quick projects and ideal for deployment to non-technical people who just need a basic computer for email, word processing, and similar tasks.

The 400 and now the 500 models take things a step further by integrating everything into a keyboard. Having a complete computer built right into a keyboard is pretty neat, in my opinion.

The main drawback has always been their reliance on SD cards (micro SD cards, to be exact). However, the new 500 series offers a compelling $200 option that includes a built-in 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. That combination makes it very attractive.

I’m constantly working on small projects to experiment with new ideas, and I think this could be a great addition to my toolkit.