As an avid cyclist, I have collected a variety of tools to keep my tires inflated, both on the road and at home. These include:

• A floor pump that has a pressure gauge and fits both Presta and Schrader valve types. We have both here in my family. This is used most frequently, because high-pressure tires tend to lose air over time.
• A portable pump that has a Presta connection that I carry with me when I am riding. This is useful if I get a flat and have to inflate a new tire just enough to fit it on my rims.
• A collection of CO2 high-pressure cartridges that can inflate my Presta tires up to full pressure. These are good for a single blast of air.

My social feeds have been filled with various ads for portable electric air pumps. In the distant past, these things were portable in the same sense that the first portable computers were: they were bulky and you wouldn’t want to carry them very far. But the latest generation of pumps weigh about a pound and could easily be carried with you on a ride, or fit in your car’s glove compartment. They range in price from $40 to $120, mostly made in China, and resemble an old-style walkie-talkie in dimensions. I bought one of the cheaper ones on AMZ.

The features that I wanted included:

• Rechargeable battery via USB. The battery should last through a few inflations of your car tires, because you are pushing a lot more air. The unit that I got needed infrequent recharging. The pump’s screen should give you a rough idea of how much charge is available. Having a USB cable also makes recharging from your car simple, if you have the right cables.
• A long enough hose that fits between the tire and the pump, so you can maneuver the pump around the target tire more easily.
• Fits both kinds of tires. The way my pump does this is with a small and imminently losable adapter that screws on to the Schrader valve if you want to inflate a Presta tire. This adapter is very hard to fit on the valve stem, and gets tight enough to ensure you aren’t deflating your tire before you even start the inflation process. It took me a few tries to figure out the process of attaching and detaching the pump from both bike and car, and it would be easier if the vendor had two separate hoses, rather than the add-on adapter, but I didn’t find a unit that came that way.
• Easy operation and usable screen. My pump shows the existing pressure when attached, and you can set it to stop automatically at a given pressure for both bike and car scenarios. That is helpful, especially for bike tires that can be easily overinflated. It also shows battery status too.

One question was could the new electric unit replace both my hand pump and CO2 cartridges on my rides? Even the smaller units still weigh more than the combination, but it is possible, although you probably have to carry it on your person or if you have a big enough bag on your bike. (My hand pump has a bracket to fit on my bike’s frame ) However, this means using the new pump twice when fixing a flat during a ride: once to get some air in the tire before you put it on the rim, then re-attach for the full inflation. It would be nice if the new pump could snap on and off the valve like my other pumps, but I didn’t see any units that offered that kind of mechanism.

I am not recommending my specific pump, and am calling the whole genre a work in progress. Some of them get very hot as their tiny pump motors work overtime to push the air through, especially for car tires. Some weigh a lot more making them difficult to carry in the back pockets of your jersey. The attach/detach process can be tricky: one time I unscrewed my valve stem completely when trying to remove the short air hose. And there doesn’t seem to be any relationship between price, quality, and user satisfaction from what I could tell.

For the past couple of years, high school seniors have been part of an interesting experiment called direct admissions. Basically, there are systems that allow them to get conditional pre-acceptance offers, without having to fill out much of an application in advance, or even think about where they want to attend. What makes these offers interesting is that they arrive unsolicited. There are a few caveats, but hundreds of students are now attending college using this method.

Back in the pre-historic era when I was a high school senior when I had to walk uphill both ways to school, we had to fill out applications by hand. There was no CommonApp, a system by which a thousand or so colleges agree to basically open source the application process. They are one of the entities involved direct admissions, I’ll get to them in a moment. Each place had its own essay to write. You also had to take standardized tests from places like the College Board, the dreaded SAT or ACT. And then there were the application fees.

Direct admissions puts all that aside. You have to have good grades, of course, or good enough grades for the particular school that you want to attend. But that’s about it. No more stuffing silly clubs to pad your pre-college resume. No more parental nagging about whether you have written word one on your essays.

Not every college is on board, yet. But it clearly is the coming wave. As costs to attend college continue to rise, the onerous application process has to be simplified. One private venture is leading the charge called Niche. Their website has a portal for students to enter the direct admissions world and while there is some information to fill out, it doesn’t seem all that difficult.

There are several states that have signed up to include every graduating high school senior in the program. They notify all graduating seniors in the fall where they have been accepted, based on their GPAs. Minnesota, for example, has 55 two and four year colleges — both private and public — part of the program. Students then have to complete an application to the school of their choice. Missouri has several schools that take direct admissions, including probably one of the best engineering schools in the state.

CommonApp began testing direct admissions in 2021, and now has more than 70 participating schools. Niche began its program in 2022 and now has its own group of 100 or so schools. (Forbes has more details here.) The two have somewhat different qualification criteria. With CommonApp, students have to live in lower-income households to get app fees waived and be the first in their generation to enter college, and can only apply to in-state colleges. Niche doesn’t have any income or geographic threshold.

As the NY Times wrote earlier this year, colleges want more students and need more applicants to maintain their student population. Idaho, which is one of the states with a program, found that student enrollment increased by several percentage points in the first year.

Now, you might guess that the top tier Ivies aren’t on board with direct admissions: they get plenty of attention from the best students. But for many other schools, this could be a way to attract students that may have never considered or even heard of the school. And who doesn’t like getting a “you may already have been admitted” notice? It could be a big ego and motivational boost for some seniors.

If you have a kid that has used direct admissions, please post your experiences, I would be interested to hear from you.

I have been a casual camera user for decades, ever since I got a simple box camera in my teens. I actually had a job as a professional photographer when I got out of college, and built my own darkroom in several homes for printing black and white pictures. This obviously was during the pre-digital era. The past few years I have been enjoying my smartphone’s camera, which keeps getting more and more capable. Going digital meant no more darkroom, and being able to print to an online photo processor by uploading my images. Here is a photo that I took recently.

Well, I come bringing bad news, although it initially doesn’t seem that way. First, cameras are getting smarter. It isn’t just a matter of better resolution images, but better software. The new Google Pixel 9 has something called Reimagine, which has some very neat tricks for in-phone picture editing as shown in this threads post by Chris Welch..This used to be the domain of a skilled Photoshop operator. Now you just tap on the right buttons.

Second, AI is moving into more “original” photography. Google’s ImageFX is now available in preview here— you type in a description of a photo that you are interested in, and within a few seconds, it creates a few images that you can choose from. My prompt of a “high-resolution photo-realistic interior of ornate teal art deco living room” brought the following image:

That is a pretty nice setup. Note the lighting effects, and reflections in the glass table  and mirror are pretty darn good.

So what is the bad news you may ask? Well, as someone reminded me, what we are seeing here are the absolute worst images that AI has produced, and the quality will only get better, much better given the pace of AI development. Soon the lenses on the back of your phone will be redundant. Those travel photos that you took of your last trip to someplace exotic? Chances are someone else has been there, posted the pix, and some AI engine has gobbled it up. Just a few clicks and you can be added in the foreground. What about pictures of things? Now Google’s Lens has been improved: it is now part of the Android OS and you can do all sorts of tricks with it to identify what you are seeing on a web page or IRL. No need to set up a pesky set of lights or to compose the perfect image. Just crop with your finger.

While you mull that over, I want to leave you with one last image, of a real electric power station near Budapest. At least, I think it is real and not some AI construct. But soon, it won’t matter much, just as we have forgotten all about using stop bath and learning the zone system.