Gracie is enjoying all the sniffs and Kolby is chillin on the front door mat. It’s a gorgeous day here, suns out, blue sky.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
“Big” George Foreman, one of the most influential and recognizable boxers of all time, died Friday, his family announced on his social media account.
RIP, Big George. 🪦
Apple is reportedly losing more than $1 billion annually on its streaming service, Apple TV+, according to The Information on Thursday — providing a rare glimpse into the tech giant’s content operation.
That’s a huge number. Apple has some really good original programming. The production value is always top notch. I’d imagine that’s why it costs so much to keep going. Take a look at Netflix. They pump out content that, overall, has a much lower production value. Those in turn fund the production of high quality content. 💸
There’s been a lot flying around the social web the past couple of days about Apple completely botching their AI push, and I haven’t seen a whole lot of solutions (I fully admit I could completely be missing it). But off the top of my head, here’s one idea that I think could really help and reap benefits for both Apple and developers.
I’d imagine a lot of developers are going to want access to an AI API.
Put AI in all the things! I’m not sure how I’d use it in my apps, yet, but I could see doing some local machine learning to help pick feeds for the user to check out. 😁
RSS and ATOM feeds are problematic (for our use-cases) for two reasons; 1) lack of history, 2) contain limited post content. We built some open-source software to fix that.
I like this, a lot! This would be a great way to make a complete backup of your blog. Just generate a gigantic RSS feed of everything and push it to GitHub and other places.
One of the things I want to do for Stream is get full content for a particular feed. For now Stream only gets what the feed includes. I’ll have to change that so it grabs the HTML and pulls the body out.
The European Commission is not backing down from efforts to rein in Big Tech. In a series of press releases today, the European Union’s executive arm has announced actions against both Apple and Google. Regulators have announced that Apple will be required to open up support for non-Apple accessories on the iPhone, but it may be too late for Google to make changes. The commission says the search giant has violated the Digital Markets Act, which could lead to a hefty fine.
It’s time to get the popcorn out to see how much these two juggernauts push the rules. 🍿
Apple has already done the very least it could do to comply with opening up the ability to have third party app stores.
What I have trouble understanding is how she continued working with sociopaths after the first few years, when it was obvious that they wouldn’t change. As she rose in the company, and spent time with “Mark” and “Sheryl,” it was clear that these two people, as well as others, don’t care about the consequences of their platform.
Facebook is a nasty, evil, company. I jettisoned my account in 2011 but thought recently about making a new one. What an idiot! I’m glad I didn’t do it.
A month of anti-Tesla dissent escalated this week with two reports of Teslas catching fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City.
I still say these Tesla cars and trucks are spontaneously combusting.
It would a real shame if the stock price sunk so low Space Karen got a margin call.
It’s too bad Tesla’s board is in Space Karen’s pocket. Tesla could use new leadership at CEO and the board.
They’re clearly not innovating or even doing the least bit to update the models they have. When was the last time the body shape changed?
Also, Musk isn’t running the company. Why should he continue to drag them down?
Fire the man already, before one of those giant lots of Tesla’s spontaneously combusts and cause a lot more damage.
After a year, the top 5 percent of apps in most categories, including gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, and social and lifestyle, make more than $5,000/month. The 25th percentile makes $5 to $20 per month, depending on the category, save for photo and video apps, whereas the bottom quartile makes $32 per month.
I’d take $32 per month! I could use it to support my coffee habit. 😁
On the flip side I’m really happy for the companies who make enough to survive on and even thrive. Good for them! ❤️
Word is spreading that Sauer Brands Inc. ― owner of Greenville’s beloved mayonnaise brand ― has been sold to none other than a northern company.
I’d never had Dukes Mayo until we moved to Virginia. In California all I remembered was Craft Mayo as a choice. Dukes became an instant hit for me the first time I had it. I hope these new owners don’t mess it up. 🫙
Robert Rodriguez • The Fresno Bee
On Tuesday, the two defendants in one of Fresno’s biggest business scandals are expected to report to federal prison to serve their sentences for wire fraud and conspiring to commit wire fraud.
I know Jake and Irma personally and I hope nothing but the best for them. I have to believe this was a huge mistake on their part. An ignorant mistake. I don’t know enough about it to know if it was or not. They did so much good for the Central Valley and other places. ❤️
Chinese automaker BYD unveiled a new range of electric vehicles that it said can charge in five minutes, ramping up its competition with Tesla in the burgeoning Chinese market.
It would be nice to see these cars here in the States. Especially if they’re in the 10-20k range. That’s the range I’d consider purchasing a new car.
Sitting out on the deck this afternoon with the pups enjoying a beautiful day.
John Roberts, Knucklehead
Hazif Rashid • The New Republic
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” - Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts, March 2025
What a knucklehead. In April of 2024 you said a President could do anything they want as long as it was done as part of their duty as President. Right. RIGHT!?
Let’s see what he said.
Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
Right, like I said, he can do whatever he wants as President.
Nice work, dumbass.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Its been a week. My back is really messing with me. I’ve had this problem for years and years and I absolutely hate when I’ve injured it. The meds I’m on leave me really sleepy so I wouldn’t be surprised if this set of links is short.
Anywho, there’s my week in a nutshell.
I hope you enjoy the links.
Brazilian Court Gives Apple 90 Days to Allow Sideloading on iOS
I hope Apple is starting to build out their infrastructure to allow for more stores but what I think most developers would rather see is Apple dropping their 27% fee for using the platform. Something more like 5% or even 10%.
Never gonna happen.
Apple on Tuesday patched a critical zero-day vulnerability in virtually all iPhones and iPad models it supports and said it may have been exploited in “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals” using older versions of iOS.
Even the best software engineers in the world make mistakes.
A 10x faster TypeScript
This video is worth a watch. It was interesting to hear their reason for using Go for the port.
Microsoft is replacing Remote Desktop with its new Windows app
So now they have a Windows app for running Windows apps?
Talk about confusing. This is weird. 🤣
Aditi Bharade • Business Insider
Kentucky’s bourbon makers are up in arms about Canada yanking their bottles off shelves
Consequences. This is a consequence of tariffs. You definitely cannot blame Canada for pulling American products off of their shelves.
A week ago, ByteDance announced the release of Lynx, a technology for building mobile apps using Web technologies. ByteDance had been using it to power many of their apps, and they decided to package it up and open-source it. Having Lynx enter the space with a new approach is great news for the community.
Yet another framework for building mobile applications.
A lot of companies are looking for ways to have a single set of code to run across mobile platforms.
It’s hard to argue against the idea of it.
The future of America isn’t being written in Washington—it’s being coded, traded, and hoarded by tech billionaires who see democracy as a bug, not a feature.
Billionaire Tech Bros need to be placed on a rocket and launched to Mars. Let them have it. 🚀
The Writers Web
The web was initially ~designed~ for writers. Styling, links, paragraphs, titles (at all levels). The ability to edit. No character limits. That’s what we had to work with when we started blogging in the mid-late 90s.
I use two different editors for writing; Tot and Bear. I write 99% of my blog posts on my iPhone and when I do use a Mac I use Bear because it could very well be the best editor for writing for the web I’ve ever used.
I use both of these applications because they give me a really nice, easy to use, writing environment.
Tot
In Tot I use straight text and add Markdown by hand. I just prefer it that way. It’s a very straightforward editor that also saves instantly. I can view my post on my Mac, iPhone, or iPad by opening Tot from any of those devices. Tot syncs it with my iCloud account. Simple, simple, simple.
Bear
On the Mac with Bear I use the full Markdown support provided by the editor. Why’s that? Well it has darned good support for copying plain text once I’ve finished writing so I can use Micro.blog to publish my completed post.
One of my favorite features is keyboard shortcuts. If I want to insert a quote I just press Shift+Command+T and I have a Markdown quote. If I want to paste a link, this is easily my favorite feature, I just select the text I want the link on and paste my link. The Bear editor handles setting up the Markdown link. It doesn’t replace what’s there. It knows I have a link to paste and does the right thing!
The only thing I really need is a publish button — with keyboard shortcut — to publish my post to Micro.blog and any connectors to allow me to view the posts I have there. I can’t do that with Bear as far as I’m aware. It’s just an amazing blog post editor. It’s so good I wish I could embed it into any existing blogging tools, like Red Sweater’s incredible MarsEdit. That would make for the ultimate blogging tool in my opinion.
Introducing Microsoft Rob!
I mentioned on Mastodon I’d had a dream I went back to work at Microsoft so Thomas Brand made this for me.
I love it! ❤️
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Its a bit late morning thanks to Daylight Saving. We’ve sprung ahead an hour.
Yesterday, Saturday, Kim and I had some errands to run and we were out of the house pretty much all day. So, you get a Special Sunday Edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. 😃
I hope you enjoy the links and have juiced up your brain with your favorite coffee or tea.
Automattic-owned blogging site and social platform Tumblr has financially backed Tapestry, the newly launched app designed to organize feeds from across the open web, including RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.
It’s really nice to see my favorite software company succeed with a new product. Tapestry is like a feed reader bulked up to do other things and allows folks to extend it using a bit of JavaScript and their own imagination. In a slight way it’s a dashboard construction kit. I enjoy using it and it’s gonna be fun to see what others build with it.
We live in an age where everything has to have a trajectory. Every hobby needs a corresponding side hustle. Every interest must be optimized, packaged, and presented for maximum reach. Paint beautiful landscapes? Better start an Etsy shop. Love baking sourdough? Time to launch a baking YouTube channel. Write poetry? Get on Medium and build your brand.
There was a time in the late 90’s, early 2000’s, where most blogs were just personal sites. Not monetized at all.
I started this blog in 2001 in the hopes I’d become a better writer. I’m still trying to do that and I really enjoy having a blog where I can write whatever I want, when I want to.
I have most of the features I asked for in textcasting (!) and I am typing in a respectable editing window, where I retain copies of my writing, and there’s no freaking tiny little text box. And because I’m hooking in through a protocol (here’s the punchline) this writing can go anywhere. Anywhere. Let me say that again. Any. Where.
Dave has continued on his adventure to have a single writing location that publishes everywhere. He’s been using WordPress as a single source for publishing to a blog and to Mastodon. Really, the WordPress blog is the Mastodon Server. I’m really interested to see where this goes.
I’ve been using Micro.blog in much the same way. I publish to my blog and the Micro.blog timeline and Micro.blog handles publishing to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr. It’s proven to be the exact solution I’ve always wanted. 👍🏼
Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they won’t use an AI assistant to help write their application.
Is AI that good or that bad? 🤣
The top of the line new Mac Studio M3 Ultra (32-core CPU, 80-core GPU) with 512G RAM (!) and a 4TB SSD is an impressive and tempting machine, but ~$11K (!!). Is that “ridiculously expensive”? 🤔
That is a crazy amount of money for a computer, even for a Mac.
It is a rocket ship of a configuration.
“I cheated the program,” Jones said, via Brent Schrotenboer of USA Today. “Like, I was really good. People don’t know how smart I am, but like, I can say it now. I don’t play no more. But like, I’ve never used my [urine] for a [urine] test. Not one time. Not one time.” (Folks, it’s OK to use the word “piss,” if that’s the word he used. You won’t go to hell for it.)
Folks will always find a way to beat the system. I am surprised he’s admitting it.
It would be nice for the players to be able to smoke weed. I’ve heard it helps a lot with post game pain.
In the span of 17 years, the USA has shifted from the hopeful progression of electing a Black president to sad self-loathing with the ascent of a dictator. There are several factors that played into this country’s demise. In my opinion, social media has had the largest impact.
Social media certainly hasn’t helped things. It’s definitely made piling on a lot easier.
The world is full of people who, in this, the Year of Our Basilisk, 2025, are willing to loudly admit, “Yeah, I knew Musk was – [pick one or all] – 1) a homophobe, 2) a racist, 3) a con man, 4) a eugenicist, 5) a natalist, 6) a nepo baby, 7) full of shit about Mars, 8) full of shit about self-driving, 9) wants to destroy public transit, 10) was never actually an engineer at all but just someone who buys companies and puts his name on them, 11) has an entire team at every company he bought whose job was just to stop him from breaking things, 12) is just absolutely fucking cringe – but I was willing to give all that a pass, for years, because He Does Good Work.”
Space Karen is just a terrible human being.
He should be deported back to South Africa.
Live Fast Motorsports is thrilled to announce that pioneering motorsport driver Katherine Legge has entered the Shriners Children’s 500 NASCAR Cup Series race at Phoenix Raceway on March 9, 2025, racing the No. 78 DROPLiGHT Chevy Camaro. This marks Legge’s debut in the NASCAR Cup Series, underscoring her determination and versatility in professional racing.
I’ve always liked Katherine Legge. When she’s run the Indianapolis 500 I’m always hopeful she’s gonna win it all.
I hope her Cup run goes really well today.
Joseph Howlett • Quanta Magazine
A new proof extends the work of the late Maryam Mirzakhani, cementing her legacy as a pioneer of alien mathematical realms.
It’s incredible to me how our scientists and mathematics continue to move us forward.
It’s also a real shame to loose someone so passionate about her work. ❤️
With the season-opening Australian Grand Prix (March 14-16) rapidly approaching, last week we asked you to pick your favourite helmet design from all our 2025 F1 drivers.
I dig articles like. It’s just about showing pictures of helmets. Simple, but fun and interesting.
Metallica’s …And Justice For All pushed bassists into the background during the 1990s, a famed thrash metal player says.
I hear folks talking about And Justice for All and the way they treated Jason Newstead from time to time.
It is a real shame to hide the bass like that.
Mexican sculptor Chavis Mármol dropped a nine-ton replica of an ancient Indigenous Olmec head onto the roof of a Tesla Model 3 in Mexico City as a brilliant commentary on modern society’s obsession with materialism, excess, and capitalism
Now that’s exactly how you treat Tesla. Destroy them, trade them in, and stop buying them.
Hopefully the market continues to hammer Teslas stock price and drive it down, down, down so the board will grow a pair and fire Musk once and for all.
Migrating from Native to React Native
Something we’ve become very good at, at WillowTree, is migrating native code to React Native incrementally. I’ve been working on a project for the last year-and-a-half to migrate a pretty big application to React Native and we’re not there yet. We’ve finally hit critical mass in the React Native codebase to begin the transition to a full React Native based application.
To start the migration we built bridges to the native iOS and Android applications to handle things like; networking, navigation, analytics, telemetry, and events.
Since the native applications had great code written for all of those things we were able to leverage it to build a brand new user interface using React Native. At one point we had a Platform Team who built out the Bridges between React Native and Native. Those teams consisted of two native iOS and Android developers and a React Native team of two. The two React Native developers built up the TypeScript side of things for communication between React Native and Native, leveraging our native bridges.
To make writing new React Native UI easier we had individual teams working on specific parts of the UI by feature. A mono-repo was created so the team could use Expo to quickly iterate the parts of their feature. The React Native Platform team made sure the App Team could mock everything and use the bridges as they’d be used with the native application. It worked out really well.
Since each feature area had its own team we would take their code and make a package out of it. Those NPM packages were then referenced and used in the native iOS and Android applications.
Let’s say we had a Social feature. That feature team would do everything to make that feature work as expected, complete with UI, business logic, and any navigation necessary to complete the feature. That feature would be bundled up into a package and deployed to a private NPM repository.
The native application would reference that package in its packages.json file by its version number and it would be installed using NPM. Once we had it packaged into the native application we would reference it using the supplied Meta React Native library code in each native application. Once the React Native Framework was strapped up it was easy to wrap up each React Native feature and display its UI, where it was completely controlled by the React Native developers.
Networking and Models
To supply the React Native code with models ready for consumption we bridged to the native applications since each had already implemented network and data caching code. The React Native bridge allowed the caller to supply all the arguments necessary to make a network request and the bridge code bundled it up, sent the request, received data (or POSTed it), updated any local caches, and forwarded it to the React Native code where it would become a TypeScript model object ready for them to consume. It was some of the first code we created and really opened the door to productivity right away.
Navigation
I’m going to talk about this from an iOS perspective, since it’s what I know.
This was a bit tricky. Navigation from React Native to Native isn’t a straight line. When creating a React Native feature we first constructed an RCTRootView. This would ask the React Native framework to load a particular feature and host it inside the RCTRootView. Once the React Native code was loaded it was running in its own little sandbox, so to speak. It didn’t have any knowledge of the outside world, except through our native bridging code.
Our navigation bridge was quite simple. It was a single method that allowed code to navigate to a native UI View Controller or to a React Native View Controller based on the name of the UI the developer wanted to navigate to. Yes, the bridging code had to know about every view controller in the application, to an extent. The developers of the iOS and Android code thought ahead and created a really nice set of routing classes. Those were leveraged to display most view controllers, native or react native.
While each feature was self contained this navigation bridge was there to provide the glue that allowed us to display anything we wanted.
One bit that felt weird was the need for the React Native code to know when it had to close itself. The native code built the UI and was hands off at that point but we had to know when to tear down that UI. The React Native code would tell us when it had to go away. Unbalanced, but a compromise that worked beautifully.
Other Stuff
There are a few more bridges we built. Each defined in a separate package supplied by our private NPM repository and built into the native applications. I’m not going to get into those now. This post was kind of off the cuff and I could go really deep into the architecture, but that is for another day, if at all. 😄
I will say this. If you were not aware you were looking at a hybrid React Native / Native application you wouldn’t know. Since React Native uses native controls for each platform you are truly getting a native application. Sure it’s using the JavaScript engine from the platform for writing code and sure the UI is described in web technologies, but the Meta React Native framework does all the work to display 100% native UI controls. That’s what makes it difficult to tell the difference.
Spring hasn’t sprung yet but is sure is a beautiful morning!
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We’ve had a pretty great week here in our part of Virginia. It’s been sunny with temperatures in the 60’s! 😎
Other than that it’s been one of those regular weeks. Nothing overly exciting going on except for the disaster that is our country leadership at the moment. But let’s not get into that here.
Please enjoy the links! ❤️
Carmel Dagan, J. Kim Murphy • Variety
Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy Arakawa Found Dead in Santa Fe Home; Oscar-Winning Star of ‘French Connection’ and ‘Unforgiven’ Was 95
This one hit me. Gene Hackman is my favorite actor of all time. There was just something about him. It didn’t hurt that he reminded me of my grandfather who was an extremely kind man but tough as nails. That’s how Hackman always came across to me.
There are my favorite Gene Hackman films.
- The French Connection
- Target
- Mississippi Burning
- The Replacements
- Unforgiven
There are many more excellent Gene Hackman films to choose from.
In the end he lived a long life and managed to live out his final years peacefully with his wife in New Mexico. 🪦
Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever
I love reading Joan’s work. Whether it be on her personal blog or on The Index. She’s just a darned good writer.
Anywho, I agree with her 100%. A weblog is the best social media site you can have because it’s yours. If your host shuts down you can freely move it and your content to a new home.
Start free with a WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, or Micro.Blog account and see where it takes you. There are, of course, others to choose from.
The next step in your journey, perhaps it should be the first, is to acquire a custom domain name to host your blog. They’re also quite easy to get and all of the blog hosting providers I mention above will let you set your own domain name. Easy least!
Nico Grant • The New York Times
“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.
I emphasized the 60 hours comment. That’s a bunch of BS. Trust me, I should know. I put in those kind of hours in the 90’s and early 2000’s. In the end they get a bunch of free work out of you and, if you have a family, your family suffers. It’s just not worth it. Ok, ok, so do a few years of it, say five, and get out.
If you’re single and don’t have any friends this may be the only way you socialize. I could see doing 60 hours a week, but at some point your mind and body pay the price for it.
I’m approaching 60 and I’d rather spend my time with my wife, children, and grand children.
Be wise. Don’t be me.
Skype, the pioneering and once ubiquitous free video calling service, will be history come May. It was so popular that people used it as a verb: “I’ll Skype you in the morning.”
I guess all good things must come to an end, right? Skype was equally loved and hated. I know folks who used it to do international calls and it’s been a huge part of the podcasting world for over a decade, probably two? Folks tried other services but Skype just worked better. It wouldn’t drop connections which is its primary job. The UI sucked but it did the job.
What are folks using today for recording podcasts? I’d love to know.
Jonathan M. Gitlan • Ars Technica
Yes, it turns out you can make a Tesla Cybertruck even uglier
I don’t know if this is uglier or just as ugly in a different way. Lipstick on a pig indeed! 🐷
It’s a garbage “truck” made by a garbage company “run” by a garbage human.
I put quotes around “run” because there is zero chance *Space Karen is performing his duties as CEO for Tesla, SpaceX, or X at the moment.
(* Yes, I pointed to Nazistack. I wish these damned good writers would get off that platform.)
Apple has offered a reason why the iPhone 16e doesn’t include MagSafe, one of the more notable omissions from its latest entry-level smartphone.
I’ve said it a few times now. This may be the perfect phone for me. Lower priced and is good enough. I’d still get iOS and an incredible piece of hardware with good battery life. Oh, and a small camera on the back. 😃
‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Draws Glowing First Reactions, With Some Praising the Opener as the ‘Best Pilot of Any MCU Series Thus Far’
I’m happy to see this back! I haven’t started watching yet, but I most certainly will at some point. Apparently we’re gonna see The Punisher show up at some point. I was a fan of that series as well. ❤️
Carson Hocevar earned a NASCAR Cup Series career-best finish Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway but was left having to explain himself afterward.
Last seasons Rookie of the Year really pisses people off. He’s been doing it since he was part of the Truck Series. Wrecking Corey Heim in the wall during the Championship Race in 2023 was a disgusting display of selfishness.
These Cup drivers won’t put up with his overly aggressive style. He’s stepped over the line from aggressive to reckless. The veteran drivers will straighten him out. It may take a few punches in the face, but they’ll fix it. 🤬
Tom Cruise who? Hulking action star Alan Ritchson has now played beloved antihero and skull-knocking machine Jack Reacher in more adaptations of Lee Child’s bestselling book series than the Reacher before him (who’s currently busy risking life and limb as a different beloved action hero), and judging by the reviews for “Reacher” season 3, it’s a role Ritchson was meant to play.
Here’s another series I need to get back to. We really enjoyed season one but haven’t watched since.
Alan Ritchson is a really great actor and he fits the physical description of Reacher much better than Tom Cruise.
The SystemV file-system that implements Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS is set to be removed from the Linux kernel. The SystemV file-system was orphaned back in 2023 while now is set to be removed entirely after developers realized the code was fundamentally broken.
Ahhh, SystemV. Seeing the word Xenix in there takes me back. Do y’all remember Microsoft Xenix? Probably not many. How about SCO? Yeah, probably not. 🤣
I installed a lot of SCO Xenix at one point in my career. I want to say by then it was SCO UNIX? My memory isn’t that clear on the matter. 😃
Since Trump took office, stocks are down and bitcoin has plunged. What’s going on?
I’m sure, like me, many of you see a headline like that and mutter something not so nice under your breath.
Why the trolling headline? If you set things on fire it tends to frighten people, especially when that thing is the government of the United States.
Old Man Rob
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Forty years ago today the doors opened for the very first MacWorld Expoin the Brooks Hall basement in San Francisco. For most of you this event probably seems like ancient history, somewhere back in the mists of time. But for me this was a very real and exciting event that I participated in as an exhibitor, the start of my amazing journey with the Mac community, a journey that continues on today.
Holy cow! Congratulations, Jim!
What a huge milestone in your career. I’m sure you have plenty of amazing stories to share from your journey.
Check out Jim’s software at ProVUE!
Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data.
If I were living in the UK I’d be contacting my representatives and ask them to reconsider their request for a backdoor into iCloud. Apple indirectly did what they were asked for. They made it easy for the UK government to extract data from Apple’s infrastructure with a simple court order and they didn’t compromise the rest of iCloud users around the world.
Like Houdini making an unlikely escape from a straitjacket, William Byron trusted his instincts and emerged from a smoky, last-lap wreck on the backstretch at Daytona International Speedway to win the Daytona 500 for the second straight time.
Here’s the Daytona 500 script. Start the race, jockey for position, get in line, at 190+ MPH, and drive around not doing too much for 199 laps. Oh, and watching a little racing between a crapload of commercials.
Then, on the last couple laps, start racing, and have a big crash taking out half the field. It’s call The Big One.
But, I still love super speedway racing. There is definitely a lot of skill to running close to 200MPH a foot or two away from each other. I’m surprised they don’t wreck more often.
There were some good story lines out of Daytona this year, like Corey LaJoie running an open car because he couldn’t land a seat or Jr. Motorsports running a Cup car! I’m very excited for both and hope to see them in a few more races this year.
Smokey Goretooth • Metal Sucks
Tool stay up to mysterious shit. Sometimes they let us know what’s going on, but they do love to be elusive about some shit. They spend years in between albums just diddling around or doing whatever they do, but their bassist Justin Chancellor gave us a lil update on what they’ve been up to musically. It’s definitely good news for the Tool aficionado.
Tool waited 13-years to release Fear Inoculum, in August 2019. It’s been five-and-a-half years since the release and I’m excited by the thought of getting something earlier. But don’t hurry, fellas. Take the time to make another amazing album.
When we set out to found Parakeet, we were certain that we wanted nothing more than to hone our craft together in perpetuity. The early days were full of experimentation and inquiry as we sought to balance our strengths and develop a unified perspective. A decade later, our creative partnership has solidified into something inextricable from either of us, totally complementary, and greater than the sum.
Congratulations to Luka and Louie! Here’s to many more years of success! 🥳
I want to state up front: I’m not leaving under a “deferred resignation”. I also wasn’t laid off. (Though it’s possible I almost was; more on that later.) Instead, I resigned from my position as a product designer, submitting two weeks’ notice…well, two weeks ago.
A sad day for Ethan, 18F , and the country. He’s a well known champion of the web and by all accounts a really great person.
As a country we need more people like Ethan working in Government, not fewer.
It’s a real loss for all of us and especially Ethan.
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has changed since then, but PerfectTablePlan is now at version 7 and still going strong.
Congratulations, Andy! This is a huge milestone and I’m extremely happy for you.
I’d love to do this! And I’d better get started because I think I only have a good 20 years remaining in my life, if I don’t do something stupid. To spend those 20 working on something I love would be amazing! ❤️
The Cause of Alzheimer’s Might Be Coming From Inside Your Mouth
This is fascinating! My father-in-law died of complications due to Alzheimer’s. He had dental problems the entire time I knew him. Maybe they’re on to something here!
The Linux kernel mailing list drama around the Rust programming language use within the kernel continues… Linus Torvalds has largely refrained from the ongoing LKML discussions around a Rust policy for the Linux kernel and in-fighting between kernel developers and maintainers with differing views over Rust. This evening though Linus Torvalds did decide to chime in on the conversation.
I’m pleasantly surprised Torvalds is this open to the inclusion of Rust in the Linux Kernel. It’s a big deal and could lead to a much more stable operating system — not that it’s unstable today. But having a memory safe language is great for the future of operating systems as a whole.
I keep hoping we’ll find out Apple has included some Swift in Darwin.
Large corporations are shopping for underground bunkers that can survive a nuclear blast to protect their data centers and C-suite employees as geopolitical tensions rise. The first adopters are primarily cryptocurrency firms, companies that build the facilities told Semafor.
This made me lol. 🤣
I can see a room full of executives in a large underground datacenter. The nuke hits. Power fails. Brownout. UPS’es kick in. Backup generators start. Everything is beeping and blooping like mad. Some machines have gone down and slowly start coming back online. Network connections have been broken. The place is basically on fire. 🔥
The camera pans to the executives who have stepped out of their beautifully furnished offices in their cave. They all look around. The CEO steps out into the middle of the group and says “Now what?” 🤣
Fade to black.
Charles Pulliam-Moore • The Verge
Today, Amazon MGM, Broccoli, and fellow Bond producer Michael G. Wilson announced the formation of a new joint venture that will give the studio full creative control over the Bond movie franchise.
A lot of Bond fans are up in arms over this move. I’m not a huge Bond fan but I really enjoyed the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig eras, Craig’s has been particularly great in my opinion.
Here’s hoping they do the franchise justice and keep making extremely great, entertaining, films! 🎥
The world champion, Max Verstappen was booed, as was his Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, while Lewis Hamilton was cheered, as was the tyre manufacturer Pirelli, so pumped up was this audience. It was the first time, surely, that mechanical grip enjoyed its fist-in-the-air moment.
F1 season is quickly approaching and I’m hoping the grid really shakes up due to all the driver movement over the off season. I’m hoping to see the legend Lewis Hamilton on the podium more often, hopefully in first place, and I expect Williams picking up Carlos Sainz will result in them becoming a fairly solid mid-pack team. I’d really love to see him podium this year but I don’t expect it.
Violence is coming.
How can it not?
More snowfall today. ❄️
Thinking about Death and Dying
As I’ve gotten older I’ve been thinking more and more about my mortality. There are some things I’d like to keep but after discussing it with my wife I realized I need to rethink things.
I wanted to keep all of my main domains; fahrni.me, crabapples.net, and hayseed.co. There’s also curmudgeon.cafe, which I’d like to have around for the folks who remain on it. That one I will be able to hand off to someone on the instance. The other three I need to do something else with.
I was talking to Kim about keeping them, but that takes money and time to maintain them. I’m now thinking I can just pull everything into my github account, leave my github credentials with Kim and just let everything else go. Rot off the vine so to speak. I won’t be alive to worry about it any longer, no need to put that stress on someone else.
To that end I think I’m going to stop using Carrd for maintaining fahrni.me, hayseed.co, and all of hayseed.co’s sub domains with plain text files, so they’re completely static and easy to move around.
Under fahrni.me I have iam.fahrni.me which is my old WordPress blog. I’ve pull all of it down as HTML, CSS, and any images it had. I can do iam.fahrni.me now. I’m no longer using it.
Most of the data under crabapples.net is completely static with the exception of my blog, rob.crabapples.net. That is maintained at Micro.blog, which I really like.
I’ve been thinking about moving rob.crabapples.net out of Micro.blog and to a manually maintained weblog. Completely static. I was inspired by Louie Mantia’s website. He manages everything manually. How can you not love that? 😃
Of course, like a knucklehead I want to put together some tools to take care of that. I’m thinking I can put everything on github and write something to help me generate my blog’s main page and publish each post as static HTML.
I’m sure as I lay dying I won’t really think about this, but I am now. 😄
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We got another 10in of snow this week promptly followed by warmer temperatures and rain that almost eliminated it over night. There’s still patches of snow on the ground.
This week we’re expected to get a foot of snow from Wednesday to Thursday. It’s been a stranger that usual weather year this year.
Enjoy the links and the ravings of a mad man. 😆
The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”
Why isn’t this in a section called Politics? Because it’s about a serious security flaw in a government computing center (maybe it’s just a server setup in someone’s closet?)
The scary thing is the kids working for DOGE — henceforth known as DODGY — have access to all kinds of personal information about you. OpSec folks must be going bonkers right now? 🤡
Spire Motorsports has to win in the NASCAR Cup Series this year.
Spire started as a very small team. Just one driver, Corey LaJoie. They eventually added a second driver and a couple years back got a huge investment of cash. They now have three drivers and are all in to becoming a top tier team. They signed longtime Cup driver Michael McDowell, Justin Haley was brought in to replace Corey LaJoie and they have last year’s rookie of the year Carson Hocevar. In other words, they’re stacked. I would expect each of them to have at least one win this year.
Just say no to JavaScript
This headline is, of course, there to get you to rage click it and go read the article. 😃
So, please, click the link and go read it. Nick is an excellent software engineer and has years and years of “in the trenches” experience to share.
This article is mainly about the benefits of writing maintainable, easy to read and understand, code. It’s something I encourage everyone I work with to do. It’s smart.
The TL;DR is use a TypeScript instead of JavaScript so you get better type checking. Take advantage of it and make your code easier to maintain all at the same time. Smart. 😃
Jyoti Mann, Pranav Dixit, and Hugh Langley • Business Insider
Several Meta employees who said they received positive performance ratings in their mid-year reviews last year had their jobs cut Monday, as the company let go of nearly 4,000 workers in its latest round of job reductions.
Companies don’t need an excuse to let you go. California is an at will state (I’m not sure if folks in other states were let go) but that doesn’t help the poor folks who lost their jobs.
Look, Zuck is the CEO of a company created to make money and please shareholders. I hate to be so blunt but that’s Capitalism.
I know the CEO of TELUS would do the exact same thing to cut our bottom line if needed.
Do I want to lose my job? HELL NO! Do I realize it’s possible? Yes, yes I do.
I hope each and every one of these folks scores much better jobs. After all, I still believe Zuck is a sociopath and Facebook is a terrible company.
Jay Peters and Alex Heath • The Verge
TikTok is back in the Google Play Store for Android users in the US, and soon it will be available on the iPhone, too.
This seems risky to me, but I guess if the folks tasked with enforcing the law say it’s ok to break it, you should just break it? 😳
I hope this doesn’t come back to bite them. I’d also like to see a better solution to this whole TikTok mess.
Recently I’ve found myself thinking about the state of pharmacy technology. Why? Simple, really. I’m bored and have been doing a little extracurricular reading. Not to mention that a few things have popped up here and there to pique my interest. It’s not one single piece of technology but rather a collection of technologies and interactions I’ve had over the past 18 months.
I love reading my brothers stuff but he hasn’t been very active since he went back to Pharmacy work full time, now as a Pharmacy Director. He’s one of the smartest folks I know and he has amazing ideas on how to improve pharmacy in the hospital.
It’s nice to see him writing again and I hope he keeps it up.
It’s frequently stated[by who?] that some core components of the AT-Protocol architecture are expensive to host and don’t scale down. So expensive that they are out of reach reach except for VC-funded commercial companies like Bluesky PBC, and expensive due to the structure of the protocol itself. Very non-decentralized.
I must confess, AT Protocol is a mystery to me. I cannot wrap my pea brain around exactly what it is and how to implement it.
This piece is about how Phil used a Raspberry Pi to do some AT Protocol stuff. Even though I don’t get it I find this encouraging. 😀
Some Apple TV 4K users in the US are being prompted to connect their Netflix accounts to the Apple TV app. This would appear to signal an end to the streaming service’s longtime refusal to have its content aggregated into third-party platforms.
This prompted me to ask the CEO of our household if I could purchase a new Apple TV. My CEO was not impressed with my justification so we’ll continue to use the Roku built into our TV. 🤣
I need to some reading on the current state of Roku technology. I’d like a box that aggregates all streaming service (like Apple TV) so I can search in one spot. If Roku does that we can stay with them. I just wish they didn’t collect so much data about us. 😞
Buried deep in a Welsh landfill, beneath layers of years-old garbage, there is a hard drive that holds the key to almost $800 million in bitcoin – or so James Howells believes, after accidentally throwing the drive away in 2013.
That drive is dead my friend. It’s been underground for 12-years, buried under heaps of trash that were exposed to the elements until it was finally covered over. I can’t see how it would survive the damp even if placed in a hardened container much less a plastic bag.
Would I love to see a miracle of some sort? Yes, I would! The odds are long against him.
One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.
Speaking of hard drives. This is pretty sobering. Atoms and bits rot. Keep moving that data around if you’d like to keep it. I have CD backups of stuff I’ve moved around. I wonder if those darned things are still readable? 🤔
Square Enix has shut down the iOS version of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and removed it from the App Store following an unfixable bug that blocked people from accessing content they had paid for.
I don’t believe this. I can’t accept this is unfixable. The more likely story it’s not worth fixing because the fix would require upgrading the software to current versions of frameworks or something like that and they don’t want to spend the money on the effort. That I would accept. 😁
The snow is still falling and it is absolutely beautiful.
The X Name is crap, long live Twitter
Do you think Space Karen knows the name X, for the social media network formerly known as Twitter, is garbage?
I wish he’d sell all the Twitter branding to Sam Altman. Then Altman can create a Mastodon or Bluesky based social network called Twitter and we’d all be happy for it.
A rebirth of an original, but even better because it would be one node in a larger ecosystem.
Here it comes! ❄️
I do love it!
More Winter
Tuesday looks like fun. We had snow on the ground for most of January. Had a week without it. And it looks like we’re gonna get some more.
This time it’s not gonna be deep freeze city afterward. The rain that follows on Thursday and through the weekend should clean it up.
I guess Punxsutawney Phil did say six more weeks of winter. 🐿️
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
This week has been a bit of a struggle. I’m still sick and feel exhausted and our country is being dismantled.
My thoughts are not so good. I’m so pissed off.
I hope you all had positive weeks and enjoy the links. ❤️
Iván Carrillo • Knowable Magazine
North America’s largest bird disappeared from the wild in the late 1980s. Reintroduction work in the United States and Mexico has brought this huge vulture back to the skies. This is the story of its comeback.
I remember these beautiful monsters as a kid and remember being really bummed out when they became extinct.
This gives me a bit of hope.
While the work was done with trapped ions, almost every type of qubit in development can be controlled with photons, so the general approach is hardware agnostic. And, given the sophistication of our optical hardware, it should be possible to link multiple chips at a variety of distances, all using hardware that doesn’t require the best vacuum or the lowest temperatures we can generate.
I find quantum computing to be way more fascinating than LLMs. When — if? — these machines become reality the world changes dramatically, again.
I’ll probably be dead before it reaches a state of usefulness, but I hope it does, and I hope the “AIs” of the world or climate change don’t kill us off as a species before then.
Sara Hashemi • Smithsonian Magazine
In Summerville, South Carolina, a mysterious light has been seen hovering over old railroad tracks. Legend has it, it’s the glow of a lantern lighting the path of a ghost searching for her decapitated husband.
I love a good ghost story and a mystery. I also learned something new! I had no idea earthquakes could produce Earthquake lights!
Now, it’s not nearly as exciting as a good ghost story but it’s still fun nonetheless. 😀
A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.
If you have the time to read a longer post and understand how some folks prefer their music apps to work, this article is for you.
As a developer I want my music player to work a certain way and be beautiful to boot but designers can go to an entirely different level when it comes to the beauty of a thing.
Both perspectives are very necessary to make beloved software.
It’s being reported that the British government secretly ordered Apple to create a security backdoor into all content uploaded by iCloud users anywhere in the world.
This is really shameful of the British government if they’ve really asked for a back door.
Remember, once you make an exception for the “good guys” the bad guys will exploit it for their own needs.
What we need now is for Apple to implement end-to-end encryption for messages and other systems. Tighten it up, don’t dumb it down.
Every awards season, movie fans and aspiring pundits across the country become obsessed with the ever-coveted Academy Awards. The longstanding awards show has long been considered the holy grail of the film industry and can often feel like an all-encompassing part of the discourse, particularly around the four acting categories. In the lead-up to Oscar Sunday, many of us debate who will win, and once the ceremony comes and goes, there are still debates over who should have won.
Some of these actors shocked me, like Samuel L. Jackson. He’s extremely good in everything he does. Two roles that come to mind are Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction and Major Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight. Oh, I also loved him in The Red Violin. I’m 100% certain I’m missing a critically acclaimed film in this mix. The man has done so much over his lifetime.
Generation X is the last cohort to have one foot firmly planted in the pre-digital world while seamlessly adapting to the rapid technological changes that followed. We were raised on mixtapes, handwritten letters, and Saturday morning cartoons, yet we were also the first to embrace personal computers, email, and the internet. This unique position grants us a rare perspective—one that values both the patience and craftsmanship of an analog world and the speed and efficiency of the digital revolution. We understand progress because we lived through it, adapting with each new wave of innovation while maintaining the ability to unplug and appreciate the world beyond the screen.
I know not everyone enjoyed their childhood but I did. We were kids of two worlds. One side middle class the other poor. But, rarely did we ever want for the basics and we always had a tremendous amount of love surrounding us thanks to an amazing mother and grandparents.
As a kid my brothers and I lived outside. During the summer we’d get up, get on our bike, and disappear for long periods of time. If not that we’d be at the trailer park swimming pool or out in the street playing football or baseball. There was always the brick yard to occupy us — the brick yard was a deep and wide hole in the ground we’d play in, swimming in the pond or jumping our bikes into it. We had lots of fun tied together with the occasional mischief.
Jerry, the middle brother, got a Commodore 64 when he was around 10 and it was great for games and the die rolling program he wrote, we played a lot of D & D as teens. I never really used his computer, he is the brains of the family, but I was fascinated by it. I also knew I wanted to be a computer programmer at some point in my life. In high school I had the chance to write some BASIC programs and I sucked at it. I was always a horrible student but at some point I figured it out.
All that to say I agree with the article. Generation X is the perfect mix of analog and digital life. We touched grass a lot and as a generation helped build some of the greatest technology on the planet.
Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath are reuniting for one last time, to play a fund-raising concert in Birmingham on 5 July.
This show is going to be amazing. Not just because of Ozzy and Sabbath. This is one for the ages and whoever gets to attend will probably have some great stories to tell. 🎙️
I didn’t think that my former (extremely former) friend and coworker could be more of an unmitigated piece of shit, but “We hired this completely inexperienced guy solely because he murdered a black man” really takes it up a level.
Mark Andressen has turned out to be a real piece of crap human being. Why anyone would work with him is beyond me. Especially now. Garbage.
Politics
Here’s the section many of you may want to avoid. Cursing may ensue, hostile opinions for sure, and general disgust lie ahead.
You’ve been warned.
We are in the early days of the destruction of our democracy. No, that’s not hyperbole. If we manage to go back to being a democracy after the next four years it will be a miracle. There’s a better than average chance the Marmalade Messiah and his boss, Space Karen, don’t leave the White House and install themselves as dictator of this new nation.
In the last three weeks Space Karen has been dismantling our Federal Government through our computer systems. He is in control, illegally.
USAID and other agencies are being ripped out, root and all, by Space Karen and his merry band of pimple faced teenagers.
When is someone with any authority going to walk into whatever building they’re occupying and arrest the entire team, Musk included?
Better yet. When will the violence begin? Musk and Trump have proven they do not respect the law and will continue to go about dismantling things until they are stopped.
Of the two Musk is certainly the bigger threat. I don’t believe he’s the genius everyone thought he was but he is smart and a narcissistic sociopath. He’s not gonna stop. The law can’t or won’t stop him. It going to take a citizen or group of citizens to end what he’s doing.
Assholes. They’re all assholes and violence may be the only way to stop them.
In the past two weeks, Elon Musk — a man no one elected to any office — has gained unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, fired thousands of federal workers, shuttered entire agencies, and installed his loyalists throughout the government. If this were happening in any other country, we’d call it what it is: a coup.
In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.
Vittoria Elliott and Leah Feiger • WIRED
A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’
Let’s start here: In a sane world, Elon Musk and his merry band of marauding miscreants would have already been arrested. For crying out loud: They have taken control of government computer systems at the United States Treasury and invaded the databases containing the private records of nearly every American, including personal medical records and financial information from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, all under the pretext of rooting out waste and fraud.
Katherine Stewart • The New York Times
To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The violence is coming. At some point people will break. It’s just a matter of time.
Random Stuff
We expected rain with a chance of sleet or snow overnight and this morning.
We have an active thunderstorm passing through. That wasn’t in the forecast. I’ve never experienced a thunderstorm with snow, not that it’s happening now, but I’d imagine it could happen? ⛈️
Speaking of under the weather. I’m still feeling terrible. Clogged sinuses and it just won’t go away. I’m also exhausted. Why can’t I shake this? 🤒
Today, expected high of 69F, nice and sunny, just a perfect day. 🕶️
Tomorrow, high of 37F, chance of snow. ❄️
It just cracks me up. The East is a weird place. 😆