So the clocks went back last night, which means I woke up at what my phone insists is 6:40 but my body swears is 7:40, and I've been vaguely useless all morning. I say this every year and I mean it every year: the "extra hour of sleep" thing is a myth. Nobody sleeps in on the day the clocks change. You just wake up early and confused and eat breakfast in the dark, which is what I'm doing right now, laptop balanced on my knee, coffee going cold.
Anyway. While I was doomscrolling through my first cup I noticed my Kindle app had a little update badge, which reminded me — I almost bought the new Colorsoft last week and I'm feeling pretty smug about not pulling the trigger.
The Kindle Colorsoft thing
Amazon put out its first color e-reader at the end of October, the Colorsoft Signature Edition, $279.99, which is a genuinely wild amount of money for a Kindle when you remember the base model is $99.99. I've been reading on a Paperwhite from 2015 that I've dropped in the bath twice and it still works fine, so I don't have a ton of goodwill left over for "premium" e-readers. But color e-ink is one of those things I've wanted to see done well for years, ever since I played with a janky one at a trade show booth ages ago and thought, this is either the future of reading or a dead end, and I genuinely couldn't tell which.
Turns out a bunch of the first Colorsoft units that shipped have a visible yellowish smudge or discoloration low on the screen, right around where your thumb rests. Not a huge defect in the scheme of things, but on a device whose entire pitch is "look how nice this screen is," it's a bad one to have. Amazon's already said they're pausing some shipments to sort it out before more go out the door. I don't think this is some huge scandal, hardware has manufacturing hiccups, that's just how it goes. But there's something very funny to me about the marquee feature of a $280 gadget being the thing that's visibly broken on day one. If I'd ordered one I'd be refreshing my order status right now instead of eating cereal.
I'll probably still get one eventually. Just not this month, and not one from the first batch.
ChatGPT can search now
The other thing that crossed my feed this week: OpenAI turned on a search feature inside ChatGPT, so instead of the model just guessing at an answer from whatever it memorized during training, it can go grab live results and cite them, kind of like Perplexity's been doing for a while. I poked at it for maybe twenty minutes yesterday, asked it about a restaurant that I knew had closed recently, and it actually got it right and linked a source instead of confidently telling me the place was open until 10pm on Tuesdays, which is the sort of thing it would've done with total conviction six months ago.
I'm not going to pretend I know how this shakes out for Google. People have been calling every new thing a "Google killer" since roughly 2019 and Google is still sitting there processing several billion searches a day without much visible dent. But I'll say this much: the two or three times I've used it for search-flavored questions this week, it's been genuinely faster than opening a new tab, typing into the address bar, and clicking through two blue links to confirm something. That's a low bar. I'm surprised it took this long to clear it.
Also, briefly
It's an election week here in the US, obviously, and I'm not going to add another 800 words of speculation to the pile — there are approximately four hundred thousand other blogs doing that today and I don't have anything useful to add before votes are even counted. I will say my group chat has gone almost completely silent since Thursday, which either means everyone's anxious or everyone's just tired. Possibly both. I'm making a big pot of chili on Tuesday night regardless of how anything goes, because that's the plan I made in September and I'm sticking with it out of sheer stubbornness.
Going to go find my other watch, the one that still needs to be changed by hand, and then probably take a nap I don't deserve.