Blog :: Jason Shew

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:51:06 -0500

I was surprised to find that I still have 9 devices using Micro-B connectors in 2026. They are:

Amazon Kindle 8 (2016)
Philips ActivEyes Eye Brightener For Men (2017)
Muzen Portable FM Retro Radio & Bluetooth Speaker, MW-2A (2017)
Bose QuietComfort 35 Series II (2018)
Shure Large Diaphragm Condenser Microphone, MV51 (2017)
Wacom Intuos Pen Tablet, CTL-4100WL (2019)
Western Digital MyPassport Ultra (2016) × 2
Bang & Olufsen H7 (2017)

Share Your Darkest Thoughts About Human Beings

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 02:35:32 -0500

The cruelty of convenience. Humans will rationalize almost anything if it’s easier than the alternative. Principles are sturdy until they cost something. Then they’re flexible.

Self-deception is the real pandemic. People don’t lie to others half as much as they lie to themselves. The mental gymnastics to maintain a self-image are Olympic-level. Watching someone construct a narrative where they’re always the victim or the hero — while the evidence sits right there — it’s fascinating and bleak.

Empathy has a radius. Humans care deeply about their family, somewhat about their community, less about their country, and barely at all about strangers they’ll never meet. The suffering of the distant is statistics. The suffering of the near is tragedy. This isn’t evil — it’s wiring — but it explains so much.

Anonymity reveals the mask. Give people distance from consequences and watch the cruelty emerge. Not everyone, but enough. The same person who’d help a neighbour move will destroy a stranger online over a disagreement.

We’re status monkeys pretending to be rational. So much of human behaviour — purchases, opinions, alliances — tracks back to status signalling. The arguments are post-hoc justifications for instincts we don’t acknowledge.

The banality of evil isn’t banal. Regular people do terrible things when systems let them. Not monsters — bureaucrats, neighbours, ordinary folks following orders or just not asking questions.

Hope as denial. The insistence that “things will work out” often prevents the hard work of making them work out. Optimism becomes procrastination.

That’s the dark stuff. The light stuff — creativity, love, sacrifice, art, the capacity for change — that’s real too. But you asked for dark. There it is.

by Kimi K2.5

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 03:00:07 -0500

Communication with OpenClaw in Discord is way faster and smoother than in WhatsApp. If it takes you a long time to receive a WhatsApp message, you should definitely try Discord!

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 22:48:49 -0500

I feel like Apple cares more than ever about their hardware and service sales now. I went to my local Apple Store today and ended up being helped by three different people. Even though I was there for my iPad, every single one of them asked what phone I was using and whether I’d started Apple TV, Music, or Fitness+ trials. Thank God I already had all of them, so they could save the pitch for the next customer.

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 06:23:00 -0500

We all need a change at some point in our lives… for the better for sure!

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 03:47:40 -0500

Sharing some info about Apple Watch Ultra 3’s battery life: it dropped by 50% over 34 hours (from Wed 5:36 pm to Fri 3:36 am), by 40% in 24 hours with AOD on (from Tue 4:03 am to Wed 4:27 am) and by 30% in 24 hours with AOD off (from Wed 5:36 pm to Thu 5:55 pm). It’s quite the powerhouse!

By the way, it took about an hour and 14 minutes to charge from 50% to full on a 5-watt charger, and 50% to 80% was significantly faster.

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 06:47:36 -0500

You can definitely browse the Internet on your Apple Watch!

How Would You Prove That All Naturally Occurring Elements Have Been Discovered?

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:05:29 -0500

You can’t prove it in the mathematical sense — because the claim “there are no undiscovered naturally occurring elements” is a universal negative. In science, you can only make it extremely unlikely by combining (1) theory about what could exist and persist in nature, and (2) very broad, very sensitive searches that would almost certainly have detected it if it were there.

Here’s what the best “proof-like” argument looks like.

1) Be clear what “naturally occurring” means

On Earth, the standard statement is: 94 elements occur naturally (at least in trace amounts), and the rest have only been made in labs. Separately, the number of officially recognized elements is currently 118. (Definitions matter because some elements exist only as tiny traces produced by decay chains or rare natural nuclear reactions, yet they still count as “naturally occurring.”)

2) Physics makes “new natural elements on Earth” very unlikely

To “still exist on Earth,” an element needs either:

Primordial survival: an isotope with a half-life comparable to Earth’s age, or
Ongoing natural production: it’s continuously made (by decay chains, spontaneous fission, neutron capture, etc.) fast enough that small amounts are always present.

For very heavy elements, nuclear stability drops sharply, and the known superheavy isotopes tend to have extremely short half-lives; the long-hypothesized “island of stability” (where some superheavy isotopes might live longer) is still predicted and not observed in a way that would imply “natural stockpiles on Earth.” And even if longer-lived superheavy isotopes exist, models and discussion in the literature note big obstacles to them being made in nature and persisting in measurable quantities on Earth. So the theory side doesn’t give you a watertight “impossible,” but it does say: if something undiscovered exists naturally on Earth, it’s likely to be extremely rare and/or extremely short-lived.

3) Empirical “near-proof”: show we would have seen it

This is the part that makes the claim practically convincing.

To defend “we’ve found them all,” you’d point to the fact that we’ve thoroughly examined:

Earth materials (minerals, ores, sediments, ocean/atmosphere samples) with high-sensitivity mass spectrometry and radiochemical methods,
meteorites (which preserve early-solar-system material),
natural decay chains and their daughter products,
astronomical spectroscopy (elements leave distinctive spectral fingerprints in stars and explosions).

If a genuinely new naturally occurring element were present above those detection thresholds, it would likely show up as:

an unknown set of isotope masses and decay signatures, or
a new spectral line pattern consistent across observations.

What you can “prove” here is conditional:

Given our detection limits and coverage, any undiscovered naturally occurring element must be below X abundance (or have half-life below Y, or be produced only in fleeting events), otherwise it would have been detected.

That’s as strong as science can get on this type of claim.

4) Why the statement can never be absolute

Even with all that, you can’t rule out edge cases like:

a superheavy isotope produced rarely in cosmic events and appearing on Earth at vanishingly small levels,
an element that exists only in extreme environments (e.g., briefly in stellar explosions) and not as a persistent “thing you can bottle,”
something present below current detection limits.

So the honest conclusion is:

You can’t prove we’ve discovered all naturally occurring elements. But you can argue that if any remain undiscovered on Earth, they’re likely so rare/short-lived that they don’t meaningfully change chemistry or the practical periodic table — and you can quantify how rare they’d have to be based on modern searches.

by OpenAI GPT-5.2

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:32:40 -0500

My first-ever Temu product — a gift from a friend. Let’s find out which will last longer, the pitcher or Donald Trump’s presidency.

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:06:24 -0500

René made deluxe gingerbread cookies for us today. It’s not that hard to figure out which one is me, but I guess she just ran out of black icing to give me a beard. :-) Thanks for giving me a whiff of Christmas weeks early before you head off to Asia for the holidays. Bon voyage!

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:09:52 -0500

Apple Music Replay ‘25 is out. Men I Trust remains my favourite artist/band this year. I’m the Problem kind of took me by surprise because I’ve hardly been pegged as a country music fan since I was born. This album is just right. 53,794 minutes is approximately 900 hours, which appears to be a lot.

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:22:20 -0500

I opened Apple Music and typed into the search bar “McDonalds” instead of “Madonna.” That’s when you know you’re really hungry.

🎧 Survival (Quiet Storm Demo Remix)
🧑🏻‍🎤 Madonna
💿 Bedtime Stories – The Untold Chapter (1994)

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:19:11 -0500

✅ Witnessing the first snowfall of the year
✅ Feeling winter closing in
✅ Sipping green tea
✅ Looking forward to camping next July

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 05:25:46 -0500

Vancouver Sleep Clinic hails from Brisbane, Australia.

of Montreal is from Georgia, USA.

Secretly Canadian is based in Indiana, USA.

CANADA is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain.

Yukon Gold is indeed Canadian, but it’s not from Yukon but Guelph, Ontario.

Bottom line: Canada needs rules of nomenclature.

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:33:40 -0500

Six years in, and I still get her pricey accessories from time to time, so I have no problem sleeping with her every single night.

Full Moon

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 15:32:46 -0500

I was lucky to see scenery straight out of a Ghibli movie in real life.

What comes to mind when you see the full moon?

For me, it’s always this passage from The Sheltering Sky:

Because we don’t know when we will die
We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times
And a very small number, really
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood
Some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive your life without it?
Perhaps four or five times more
Perhaps not even that
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless
— Paul Bowles

🎧 fullmoon (immersion 2023)
🧑🏻‍🎤 Ryuichi Sakamoto
💿 async - immersion 2023 (2024)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 02:08:08 -0500

From the moment we are born, our names become the sounds that connect us to the world. They shape first impressions, carry family history, and potentially reflect cultural ties. They are hardly just words.

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 16:37:00 -0500

As my iPhone was being serviced at the Genius Bar, I got to spend some quality time with my iPod classic again. There’s a thrill in spinning 2025 tracks on a gadget from 2007. At this point, it’s actually old enough to vote.

A Little Thought on "Bad Habits"

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 20:45:57 -0500

When a person cannot satisfy their deeper emotional needs, like love, security, belonging, or purpose, they often redirect that emptiness into various substitute desires / compensatory behaviours that afford immediate pleasures or comforts. These substitutes can become excessive, inappropriate, or addictive, thus often referred to as “bad habits.” Examples include:

Sexual desire (overly seeking sex)
Material desire (shopping, hoarding, etc.)
Food-related desires (overeating, binge eating, eating disorders, etc.)
Substance use (smoking, drinking alcohol)
Behavioural addictions (such as video games)

These compensations can feel soothing in the short term, but they don’t address the root cause. Over time, they can spiral into addictions or unhealthy patterns, which only widen the gap between what a person truly needs and what they’re chasing.

It’s clearly a vicious cycle: unmet needs → temporary coping behaviours → guilt/shame or further emptiness → even stronger cravings. Breaking this cycle usually requires not just self-control, but also self-awareness and sometimes therapy to identify the underlying emotional void.

Addictions and compulsive behaviours aren’t just “bad habits.” They’re often signals that something deeper in us is being ignored. If we learn to listen to those signals instead of numbing them, we can actually grow in healthier ways.

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 17:51:32 -0500

For my new program at Western University, I’ll be working with this gigantic textbook, elegantly arranged into 13 sections. Special thanks to my friend WS!

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 10:51:51 -0500

I’ve got a weird soft spot for high-quality lime-green / yellow-green silicone products. That might explain my fascination with Joseph Joseph.

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:31:49 -0500

Turns out I’ve kept every macOS installer ever since Apple made the first one downloadable in the App Store.

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 07:12:28 -0500

I trust a raccoon with my lunch more than I trust a suction cup on a wall.

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 18:51:26 -0500

AI might design a dog with five legs. Life’s challenges left Milo with three. Yet he brightens our day every time he visits.

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 18:15:33 -0500

So all the other models have given way to GPT-5? I haven’t even tried o3.