Rob Fahrni

President-elect Donald Trump said his inauguration on Monday will take place inside the U.S. Capitol rather than outdoors because of severe cold, the first time in 40 years that U.S. presidential inaugural ceremonies will be moved indoors.

The reason is simple. Through all the bluster, Donald Trump is just a big sissy boy. He’s afraid he’s gonna get a little cold sitting outside. A real man would suck it up and enjoy the moment.

Well, there’s that, and he’s terrified his crowd size will, once again, be much, much, smaller than previously. Remember how tiny his crowd was in 2017? Yeah, it was tiny compared to the mass of folks who went for President Obama or President Biden who followed him.

He’s so hated I’d imagine most of the CEO’s he’s somehow gotten to be there would rather be sitting alone in the cold than be seated behind him.

I keep expecting to read of another assassination attempt on the Marmalade Messiah.

It will happen. He’s equally adored and hated here in the States. Worldwide I’d imagine there is more hatred for the man.

I’ve been wondering the same thing. 🤔

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We got a little winter wonderland last Sunday night and into Monday. Overnight we got a tiny bit more. Not enough to cripple Charlottesville or the surrounding area, just enough to make it really dangerous to use the roads on Monday and Tuesday. ❄️

The remainder of the week has remained below freezing and next week is expected to be the same. 🥶

My coffee is piping hot and I’m ready to share some links. I hope you enjoy them.

Oh, I almost forgot! I now have a store for Stream.

By Jessie Yeung and Rebekah Riess • CNN

Deadly Los Angeles wildfires: New evacuation orders as biggest blaze stretches east

Being a native Californian I understand what these poor folks are going through. This sort of thing has become all too familiar to people in Norther and Southern California. There is a Fire Season in California for heavens sake and each year brings some kind of fresh hell to the state.

Oh, and those poor people have more of this to look forward to due to climate change. Joy.

If you think the response to the fires was botched, think again. These fires spread quickly due to Santa Anna winds blowing up to 98MPH. It’s believed that caused the fire to spread quickly and now there are fire fighters working around the clock on four different fronts.

Here’s hoping they get them under control soon! ❤️

Nick Schäferhoff • WordPress.com

So, you are considering creating a personal website. Congratulations! In my opinion, that’s one of the smartest decisions you can make.

Now, more than ever, is a great time to create a weblog. Social media companies like Facebook and X have become more hateful than ever. It’s time to own your content and stop feeding the corporate marketing machines with your stories.

I recommend Micro.blog for blogging and Mastodon for your social timeline. Micro.blog also has a social timeline that is compatible with Mastodon and Bluesky. It’s well worth the $5/month. I haven’t used Micro.one but it’s a less expensive version on Micro.blog at a super cheap $1/month.

This blog is hosted by Micro.blog so it’s extremely easy for me to recommend.

Bobby Borisov • Linuxiac

In a remarkable two-year effort, the maintainers of the popular Fish Shell have officially released a beta of Fish 4.0—this time written almost entirely in Rust instead of C++.

I find this fascinating. I always tell folks that rewrites are typically the death of a thing. This team may be an exception to that rule.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this project to see how folks feel about the new shell.

Slashdot

Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic’s handling of a disputed plugin.

This is a wild turn of events I’d imagine is designed to get WP Engine to contribute more to the WordPress project because they’ll need to if they’d like to see new features added.

I don’t want anything to do with the politics behind this. Wordpress is a great piece of software and I hope it continues to be. Not updating as frequently may be a good thing. It’ll allow the community to take a deep breath and not worry about future changes causing additional bugs. It will also allow folks to stabilize and fix whatever bugs they’re aware of since that looks like a primary focus going forward. I hope it works. 🤞🏼

Jens Gustedt

With this post I will concentrate on the here and now: how to use C’s future lifesaving defer feature with existing tools and compilers.

Defer is one of those keywords/features I really appreciate about Swift. It’s really nice to have a compiler enforced way to guarantee your code can cleanup, even if something goes wonky. 👍🏼

Ryan Christoffel • 9To5Mac

AMD introduced a powerful new laptop chip today, the Ryzen AI Max. The company compared its new chip to Apple’s M4 line in several benchmarks, but there’s a very important detail it left out.

Heh, I didn’t realize AMD didn’t compare their new chip to Apple’s M4 Max. Hey, AMD still has a generally useful chip and I’m sure laptop makers are ready for it.

Richard Lander • .NET Blog

We maintain multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN) instances for delivering .NET builds. Some end in azureedge.net. These domains are hosted by edg.io, which will soon cease operations due to bankruptcy. We are required to migrate to a new CDN and will be using new domains going forward.

One would think Microsoft, with its deep pockets, would spend a little cash to keep this bankrupt company afloat while they properly transition their services to their own data center. It’s also odd to me that Microsoft would use a third-party for this service being its important infrastructure. Weird.

I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall of those meetings.

Nick Ripley

Recently I diagnosed and fixed two frame pointer unwinding crashes in Go. The root causes were two flavors of the same problem: buggy assembly code clobbered a frame pointer. By “clobbered” I mean wrote over the value without saving & restoring it. One bug clobbered the frame pointer register. The other bug clobbered a frame pointer saved on the stack. This post explains the bugs, talks a bit about ABIs and calling conventions, and makes some recommendations for how to avoid the bugs.

Oh my goodness I love reading tech articles like this. Go is one of many new classes of memory safe languages. But the memory safety is only as good as the language team’s tooling.

This article explains how one person just made Go a bit more safe for all of us.

Jacob Bartlett

In 2017, Chris buggered off to mess around with AI. Tim Cook’s MBA buddies began to wriggle their tendrils into Swift and guide it towards its next life stage.

Swift has 217 keywords? Good grief. I don’t use many of those, I’m certain of it. I’m not very bright and I’m very slow to learn new stuff. I’m champing at the bit to fully embrace SwiftUI and async/await support in Swift 6.0. Ive found async/await to be particularly difficult to grok. The current networking code in Stream is working just fine so I have plenty of time to adjust to async/await as long as Apple doesn’t deprecate their old support. Fingers crossed. 🤞🏼

Liam Reilly • CNN

The Washington Post on Tuesday laid off roughly 100 employees across its business division, the latest indication of the newspaper’s financial woes after subscribers and staffers revolted over owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

I’m hoping Kara Swisher and a group of investors purchase WaPo from Bezos. I don’t. Think it’s for sale but I believe Kara could turn it around and make it into the countries best source of investigative reporting, political or otherwise. I think it would also become a lot braver in its coverage of political corruption in DC.

Politics

I’m trying something a bit different this week. I’m grouping all my political links and opinions here at the bottom so folks can skip it altogether if they’re sick of reading about it.

I’ve had some folks reach out to say they like Saturday Morning Coffee, except for the politics. I understand. I’m sick of it to, but I can’t ignore what’s happened and is about to happen in our country.

So, please feel free to skip this part. It’s about politics! ❤️

Anna Merlan • Mother Jones

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally.

I’ve said time and again that Zuck is a sociopath, maybe psychopath? At minimum he’s a narcissist, right? (I’m not a psychologist, but I play one on Saturday mornings.)

This sudden capitulation to Trump is pure cowardice. Marmalade Messiah threatened Zuck and he folded like a cheap suit.

Facebook is now compliant with the destruction of Democracy. Shameful.

Jeff Tiedrich

those are hurricane-force winds. it’s a hurricane made out of fucking fire. one ember can travel miles, land somewhere else, and start a whole new fire — and that’s exactly what’s happening right now all over the Los Angeles area.

It’s really pathetic that Orange Man and Space Karen have tried to turn an absolute tragedy into a political chess piece.

The fire is tragic whether started intentionally or not. It’s not because of DEI or some government conspiracy. It’s tragic. Plain and simple.

Manton Reece

Tim Cook gives $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee. I think this event will be a turning point in how we view the Apple CEO.

I didn’t expect Tim Cook to kiss Trump’s big ass. But here we are. Shameful.

M.G. Siegler

$1M Knee Pads

That is a great summary of what tech CEO’s have been doing. Buying $1M knee pads to kiss Trump’s ass.

I hope democracy can survive the next four years, Trump doesn’t declare himself benevolent dictator, and leaves office after his lame duck term. Here’s hoping.

Please release all the Department of Justice Special Counsel reports behind the indictments of President elect Trump.

As a nation we deserve to know what our future leader allegedly did so we can form our own opinions, given the Supreme Court made it difficult to prosecute a President for crimes committed while in office.

We all know he’s a criminal. We should know about his many crimes.

I’d encourage everyone to make a similar blog post if you have a blog, or post to your favorite social network. We really need this to happen for the good of our country and for future generations to understand what a mistake we made by electing Donald J. Trump to a second term in office.

My new Stream phone cases are live on Cotton Bureau! YAY! 🥳

Now we wait on the t-shirts! This is so exciting!

Anna Merlan • Mother Jones

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally.

Now, more than ever, is time to start your own weblog. Zuck and Musk don’t own the internet. It’s open to all.

Dump Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Space Karen’s X.

Go social on the open web with the likes of Micro.blog, Mastodon, or Bluesky.

See what I did with that title? I’m here all week.

It’s been snowing overnight and when we got up this morning Kolby was like “Oh, it’s that cold white stuff. Guess I’d better do my business so I can go back inside.” That’s just what he did. No sniffing about. Get ‘er done.

Gracie on the other hand was like “OMG! I love this stuff it’s cold and fluffy and I should lick it! Now I should lose my brain and do zoomies around the yard for the next five minutes!”

Keep in mind that Ms. Gracie is a 110 pound Great Pyrenees. She doesn’t usually move that much or that fast.

She did her zoomies, tried to coax brother into playing, then decided to take a break in the snow by lying down.

She loves it so much. 🐶

Now they’re both passed out in the floor. Busy morning.

Snow has started falling. It’s supposed to go all night. Guess we’ll see. 🥶

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m back and feeling much better! This week was a mix of recovering from being sick and trying to ease back into work. Next week we kick off the next phase of the project I’m working on and I’m looking forward to seeing what we’re gonna do.

Coffee is in and links are linked. Enjoy! 😃

John Brayton • Golden Hill Software

2024 was a big year for Unread. The highlight of the year was the release of Unread for Mac. I first announced that I would be working on a Mac version at the start of 2023. I released the first public beta at the start of 2024. I released the final version in July 2024.

A big congratulations to my friend, John! I had the fortune to be a beta site for Unread and give John a little feedback over the course of it.

The Mac version of Unread is 100% a “Mac assed Mac app.” It’s beautifully designed, fast, and feature rich.

Unread’s biggest unlock is its syncing service. No need to purchase a third party service for sync, it’s built right in.

Highly recommended.👍🏼

Ann Telnaes

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

This is absolutely pathetic. I would really love to see Bezos sell the Washington Post. The billionaire class in America needs to be dismantled. They’re not helping the country, at all. They’re just as bad, if not worse, than Russian Oligarchs. I never thought I’d see our country come to this in my lifetime. Pathetic.

Mike Allen • Axios

Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration

Boy-oh-boy CEO’s are lining up to kiss Marmalade Messiah’s ass.

I really, really, hate this. Cook is an openly gay man and Orange dude wants the LGBTQ+ community to disappear. He’s supporting a man, and a movement, that hates him with everything in their being.

All these CEO’s are playing right into the authoritarian playbook. They’re obeying in advance. Not good for our nation.

Manton Reece

If someone signs up for Micro.one and they later need the extra advanced features and cross-posting, they can upgrade from the $1 Micro.one subscription to the standard $5 Micro.blog subscription. It’s a natural upgrade without gimmicks.

This is an amazing deal for a blogging/micro blogging service.

Congratulations Manton and team!

Noë Flatreaud

The more I learn about Lua’s design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It’s very rare to see software that does so much with so little code.

Lua is an extremely cool little language. You can run it standalone and you can embed it into your application. When I was at Pelco one of our developers wrote a test harness for our media pipeline that embedded Lua and he used it to drive integration tests. It was an excellent use of Lua. I’m a fan.

Jayski’s Silly Season Site

Corey LaJoie not expected to return to Rick Ware Racing

This is a real bummer but not unexpected. LaJoie had a rough year and was out performed by his Rookie of the Year teammate, Carson Hocevar.

I could tell there was something off with Corey on his podcast, Stacking Pennies. There were times when he came across angry or down.

I like Corey LaJoie and I hope he finds a seat for the 2025 Cup, Xfinity, or Truck Series. He certainly is an underdog who’s never been in good equipment until the 2024 season.

Remy Tumin • The New York Times

The end of the year may be associated with the holiday season for many, but Daniel Stern refers to it as something else: the “Home Alone” time.

Daniel Stern’s Marv in Home Alone is unforgettable. My favorite scene with him is the tarantula scene. That scream was surprising and way higher pitched than I expected.

It’s neat to see talented folks like him go off and explore other things. I’d love to have one of his sculptures!

Nic Berg • Hagerty

Naoko Nishimoto vowed to give up driving when she reached the age of 80. That meant finding a new home for her treasured Mazda RX-7, which she ordered new 25 years ago.

Just look at that RX-7. It’s pristine. It’s also really cool of Mazda to buy it back.

John Voorhees

Yesterday, the team at Lux announced that they are working on the next major release of their pro camera app, Halide, which will be dubbed Halide Mark III. The next iteration of Halide, which Lux hopes to release in 2025 will focus on three areas

This tiny team has done some incredible work over the years and done stuff with photos I had no idea was possible. Last I checked it was three folks doing all this incredible work! Talented Indie shops like this are so impressive and I hope they’re able to operate for as long as they want.

Liz Pelly • Harper’s Magazine

Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.

This is kind of disgusting and deceiving. If Spotify wants to do this, fine, do it. But at least have the guts to tell your listeners it was created by Spotify and don’t play this dishonest game of making up artists.

Amber DaSilva • Jalopnik

Old cars with modern drivetrains are often terrible. People go too far in their restomods, turning classic muscle cars into the automotive equivalent of those LED-ridden black leather couches.

I love the idea of converting a traditional gas powered vehicle to all electric. I wish I had a bunch of money that would allow me to quit my job so I could experiment with all kinds of things. Something I’ve always wanted to do is get a beater car, rebuild the motor, transmission, and rear differential (the drive train) to create a mechanically sound, aesthetically unmodified car.

Why not make it an EV? 😃

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

The Delta gaming emulator is now providing a link to sign up for Patreon-exclusive membership perks directly within the iOS app in Apple’s US App Store.

How in the world are they getting away with this?

I have to believe if all iOS Developer knew they could get away with this they’d choose to do their own payment system to avoid the 15-30% they have to give Apple. Seems a no brainer business decision. As it is the 15-30% is the cost of doing business with Apple.

Jonathan M. Gitlin • Ars Technica

Honda and Nissan to merge, Honda will take the lead

This was a big surprise when I read it. It will be very interesting to see their car lineup once they’ve settled down.

I hope they keep Nissan trucks, they’re really nice.

We’re getting prepared for a deep freeze here in Charlottesville. We’ll see if the projected 10in of snow falls on Monday or if, as often happens, it completely changes and we get rain instead of snow. 😂

It is supposed to get pretty darned frigid.

Happy New Year y’all! 🥳

Here’s hoping 2025 is really boring for all of us!

I don’t believe in making resolutions for the new year. If something needs doing, just do it.

I’m just starting to feel better after a few days fighting off a stomach bug. There’s an alarming trend with my health. When someone in my family gets sick I seem to be the only other member of the family to get sick.

Friday afternoon I started feeling uncomfortable. By Friday evening my granddaughter and I were both pretty darned sick. She was worse off than me. She stopped vomiting around 11PM and fell asleep. Poor baby was wiped out.

I puked my first and only time at 2AM (my issue has been the other end!) Last time I checked the time it was 2:45AM. I fell to sleep sometime after that.

She woke up Saturday feeling much better. I, on the other hand, slept most of the day and stayed in bed as much as my gut would allow.

The dogs woke me up Sunday morning. I was still off. I felt detached from my body. When I’d touch things they didn’t feel real. No fever, but it’s often how I feel with a fever. I managed to eat dinner. My first meal since the slice of pizza I had Friday evening before symptoms really kicked in.

Here we are, Monday morning. My gut is still gurgling and feels fragile. I did have coffee. I was hoping it wasn’t a mistake and so far, so good. No vomiting since Friday but still having issues out the other end. I’ve managed to keep down water and Gatorade just fine. Today I’m hoping some additional solids will help get me over the hump.

All of this to say I’m thinking about my mortality more than ever before. My body is breaking down and I’ve not helped myself by becoming morbidly obese — according to the doctor based on my weight. I get tired easily and my body flat out hurts most of the time. I sit on my butt way too much. I’ve become that lazy man I said I’d never become and it’s going to kill me. And still, after all that, I lack the motivation to do anything about it.

What’s wrong with me?

To be totally honest I can’t die anytime soon. I’ve predicted my own demise at 80 years old if things don’t change. I have a wife, kids, and grandkids who still depend on me. Couple that with being an idiot when it comes to financial planning and I’ve setup the perfect American nightmare scenario. Aging husband, retired wife, two kids who struggle in our economy. We are one medical disaster away from all of us living on the streets. That’s the most American thing I can think of.

One of my biggest issues is having a positive attitude about things working out. I’ve always felt like we’ll be ok and find our way through. To date, we’ve managed to just that.

I’d imagine this is a fairly average tale as folks age and realize they are indeed mortal and they did a horrible job of financial planning. Also, I believe, very American. 😂

Kim, my amazing wife, is right. I need to make big changes. I used to be active and loved going to the gym. I need to exercise more. I also need to stop abusing my body with crummy food. I love fast food. There, I admitted it. I love to eat. It’s a terrible attribute. Why couldn’t I be “addicted” to math the way I am to food? Genetics has something to do with it, I’m sure. I developed a strange attitude after almost dying at the age of 17. My attitude was: If I want it, I’m getting it. A second piece of pie? Yes, please. Yep, another brilliant strategy.

If anyone knows of a study that’s been conducted on people’s relationship with food please point me to it. I obviously have a bad one. It’s like being a crack addict or alcoholic. It’s like staying in that abusive relationship because you’re in love. I’m sorry if that comparison offends anyone. I have no other way to make my point. I have a real problem.

I know, I know, what a strange thing to share.

This is just me with a quiet morning to myself, coming off being sick, with a slightly addled brain (still feeling detached) from the ordeal. 🤪

A very Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! 🎅🏼

Hearing folks calling a YouTube video a Podcast is weird.

Being a blogger at the time the Podcast was created forms my opinion about what a podcast is. I believe it’s all about audio. I’d love to know how Dave Winer and Adam Curry define it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m running a bit behind again this week. Kim, Taylor, and I went out for breakfast this morning at TipTop and I had their excellent biscuits and gravy. Something else of not at TipTop is their coffee. It’s excellent! So, if you’re ever in Charlottesville head over to the Pantops area and visit TipTop Restaurant for breakfast. Hopefully you like it as much as I do.

This week was my last week of work until the new year. My brain has been checked out all week, thinking ahead to Christmas and time with our girls, grandkids, and son-in-law.

Oh, we also had a little snow flurry this morning. It was a single cloud overhead and once it passed no other cloud has dropped snow. We saw cars in Charlettesville with snow on them. Not much. Just the tiniest dusting. I’d love to have an inch or two for Christmas, but I we don’t have any in the forecast. Just cold, which is also fine.

I hope you enjoy the links!

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress.org

I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.

This feud is getting more and more dramatic by the day. I’m surprised it hasn’t been forked a bunch of times and taken in new directions.

What happens to WP Engine if the community fragments and different versions of WordPress evolve? Shouldn’t WP Engine fork it and do with it what they please? Yes, of course. Will they? I doubt it. They’re owned by a private equity firm, Silver Lake. All they want to do is bleed the company dry, sell it off for parts, and move on to the next company.

Joost de Valk

We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is “Democratizing publishing”, we’ve been very low on exactly that: democracy.

This is probably what the WP Engine folks should be doing and I hope more of the community gets behind this effort.

Manton Reece

Some people think that wouldn’t go far enough, that WordPress would be better off with someone new taking over Matt’s role across the project. I’m not convinced. WordPress and Automattic didn’t accidentally become successful. They are successful in large part because of Matt and the teams he built.

The reason I’m linking to Manton is because I think he’s become a leading voice for the open web, blogging, and micro formats. He’s built a nice business on top of open web technologies and fully embraced micro blogging formats like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Nostr. He’s also opened up Micro.blog to post to Tumblr and WordPress blogs. Basically Micro.blog has become the center point of blogging for me. I write on Micro.blog and it gets published to these other locations automagically. Of course you, the blogger, have to configure Micro.blog to publish to these other places but that’s easy. Once you’ve done it, it just magically happens when you post. Easy peasy.

So, if you’re looking for a pure blogging platform give Micro.blog a look. It’s well worth the $5 per month and you can start with a free account just to give it a try.

Cory Doctorow

When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:

Once of the promises of Bluesky was that by creating the AT Proto protocol the service wouldn’t exist as a single entity, there would be many implementation that all tied together. So far everything is centralized under Bluesky.

I haven’t fully wrapped my brain around what AT Proto really means for the open web. I’d asked what it would take to spin up an instance on Bluesky and I learned there aren’t really other instances but you could host your own data anywhere as long as you did an implementation of a specific portion of the protocol. I have so much to learn.

Drew McCormack

Today, I’m launching Forked, a new approach to working with shared data in Swift. And it has actually worked out better than I expected. I wasn’t even sure it would be possible to build, but with the new Swift macros, I was able to come up with a minimal API that seems to work great. I’m really looking forward to dog fooding it.

This looks extremely interesting to me. I’ve had requests from folks to provide a mechanism to sync Stream feeds across multiple devices. Forked may provide that means. I will be putting some time aside to give Forked a try. Hopefully it’ll do what I need to make syncing work across devices without the need to build a backend service, which could be terribly expensive and time consuming to operate.

Kelly Crandall • Racer

McLeod and co-owner Matt Tifft sold the charter to Spire Motorsports. In doing so, the organization chose to go from a full-time operation to competing on a limited basis, primarily on superspeedways. McLeod made five starts in 2024 (plus two for Carl Long’s team) in the Cup Series and four (plus one for Long) in the Xfinity Series.

I’ve written before about how much I like B.J. McLeod. He’s the little guy, not some giant team with backing from a major manufacturer like Chevy, Ford, or Toyota. It’s surprising a little team like his can put a fairly competitive car on the track. He’s especially good at what are considered Super Speedways like Daytona and Talledega.

He failed to qualify for the 2024 Daytona 500 so I hope he manages to make it in 2025. I would love to see him pull off a miracle win at one of these Super Speedways. Sure, it’s not likely, but of all track types Super Speedways are very unpredictable because of pack racing. These cars are so equally configured they typically run within a few tenths of a second of each other.

I’m looking forward to the opening of the 2025 NASCAR season in February.

Paul Krugman • Bluesky

Reminder for anyone who doesn’t know: I’m writing almost every day on my Substack

I like reading Paul Krugman but he’s decided to host his writing on Nazi loving Substack and that is a bummer. I have a large list of writers I wish would move to a better service (if they must have a service.)

It would be just as easy to host on WordPress.com or even Micro.blog. I’m not sure if Mr. Krugman plans on having a subscription plan but Substack is a terrible choice for it and his wonderful writing.

Jake Johnson • Alternet

UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote in a New York Times op-ed Friday that the for-profit U.S. healthcare system “does not work as well as it should” and that “no one would design a system like the one we have,” admissions that came as his industry faced a torrent of public anger following the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive.

Medicare for all with the United States Government as the single payor. Yeah, sure, we’d need to pay taxes to make it work but medicine operated as a for profit business is a huge mistake, not to mention the disaster that is medical insurance.

Christopher Harper • Tom’s Hardware

A recently posted photograph of old-school Commodore 64s, which debuted 42 years ago, in use as registers at a modern bakery has attracted a lot of attention. As further sleuthed by commenters, this bakery was identified as the Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg, Indiana, and the last publicly posted picture of the Commodore 64 register was in 2021. As such, we called the shop, and they verified that the registers are still in use. At the time of writing, the establishment in question has 488 Google reviews with an average 4.7-star rating and 202 Facebook reviews with an average 4.5-star rating— and, if some reviews mentioning the C64 are any indication, it even seems to be busier than usual, likely encouraged by the spreading word of this retro tech curiosity.

How cool is this? My brother had a Commodore 64 and he had a ton of fun playing games on it. He also wrote a program to generate D & D characters, as one did in the early 80’s.

I think about old tech like this from time to time and wonder if it could be repurposed to very specific tasks. The answer is obviously a resounding YES!

I wonder how they keep the equipment from getting all sticky and covered in flour?

Orange Man has lost his ever loving mind.

What do you want to do? Invade Canada? I bet half of the US would help our lovely neighbors to the north. 🇨🇦

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Welcome to a Sunday morning edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. 😃 My youngest daughter and I went to breakfast — TipTop Restaurant — and did a bit of Christmas shopping yesterday. It’s something we do every year. You might say it’s tradition. 🎅🏼

Todays forecast calls for a little snow. ❄️ I hope it happens.

My coffee is nice and hot. Let’s get started.

Enjoy!

Pauli Poisuo • /Film

Horror legend Stephen King has written a fair few books over the years. Ever since he burst on the scene with “Carrie” in 1974, he’s given fans at least one book nearly every year. Since most of his work has been extremely popular, he’s also established himself as a bit of an authority on the horror front — and isn’t shy about commenting about either the genre or his craft as a writer.

Who doesn’t love Stephen King? I’ve only read a few of his books but my wife Kim has read everything he’s ever written, including his first attempt at self publishing a digital book called The Plant.

I enjoyed following him when Twitter was around and I’m thrilled he’s joined Threads so I can follow him once again.

Now, can we please get his account connected to Mastodon?

Ev Williams

Mozi is a social app — not in the sense of “social media.” But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.

It’s nice to see an actual social app. I was working with a small group back in 2015-2016 building this exact application. It was called Jaunty but execution is what matters and Mozi is beautiful.

Abid Rahman • The Hollywood Reporter

Bluesky Hits 25M Users As Exodus From X Continues

I still prefer Mastodon but it’s really nice to see Bluesky growing and Space Karen’s social network shrinking.

I’d encourage folks to checkout Mastodon and use their mobile app to sign up and use mastodon.social as your instance, it’s the default. Once you learn how an instance works and what it means to be on a different instance you can move your account. And, no, you don’t have to move, ever. 😃

Matthew Christopher • Atlas Obscura

Even looking down from a rooftop onto the overgrown ruins of Lenin Square, it’s difficult to comprehend the scale of loss in Prypiat, Ukraine. Perhaps, like me, you’ve been fascinated by the tragedy of Chornobyl, as it is known in Ukrainian*, for decades.

I’m fascinated by Chernobyl. I remember when the meltdown was reported and the confusion and concern that followed. Things could’ve been much, much, worse.

Jayski’s Silly Season Site

From Brazil to Mexico and beyond, NASCAR continues emphasis on global expansion

The thing about this expansion is it’s all about having a local league. What I’d like to see is the NASCAR Cup Series go to different countries. In 2025 NASCAR will visit Mexico City and that’s a great start but I’d like to see them go to Europe and run some of the most famous tracks in the world.

[Christine Lemmer-Webber] (https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/)

A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky’s team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.

The two pieces from Christine and the response from Bryan Newbold are really good reads. If you’d like to understand a bit more about how ActivityPub/Mastodon work vs. ATProto.

Emily Hemphill • The Daily Progress

Standing on the corner of Water and Second streets off Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall this past September, two men tilted their heads back to fully take in the towering husk of a building that has sat derelict for roughly 16 years.

When I started at WillowTree I was in the building diagonally across from it and it’s a complete wreck and an eyesore. It should be torn down to make way for something beautiful.

I miss working on the mall. I wish the company was still down there.

The picture above was taken in December 2019, looking down on the Downtown Mall. It was the first snow of the season.

Alex Harrington • Newsweek

NASCAR Shocks FRM and 23XI by Withdrawing Charter Offer Amid Legal Dispute

This isn’t a surprise to me. Front Row and 23XI filed a lawsuit against NASCAR. They followed up by asking the court to not allow their current charters to expire and it sounds like NASCAR won that battle.

I hope 23XI and Front Row survive.

At work we’ve started using Bruno. It’s nice but it’s also an Electron App. I’m already learning React Native on iOS because we are getting a lot of requests for applications written using React Native. We build apps for clients so it makes sense for their apps to be written once so they work on both Android and iOS. They get their money’s worth, I suppose. It’s all about squeezing more out of us. But what does that say about craft? To me it says it doesn’t matter. We’ve fallen into the Accenture trap. We are hired guns who need to pound out code everyday at the fastest possible pace, with high quality of course, and use the lowest common denominator toolset. 🤢🤮

Anyway, I’m feeling a bit spicy this morning for some reason. I really need to improve my SwiftUI and pound all the new concurrency stuff into my tiny brain but I’m torn because to be useful to my company I need to become a React Native expert.

Guess I’ll have to use Stream and Top Secret Project to learn SwiftUI and Swift Concurrency. 👍🏼

Apple Newsroom

Apple honors 2024 App Store Award winners

Congratulations to all the winners!

Not gonna lie, I’d love to have one of those blue beauties on my shelf. 😍

My apps need to be so much more polished and feature rich before I could even dream of such an honor. I have the likes of Unread, Reeder, and NetNewsWire to compete with. All beautifully designed and developed.

Having said that, you should go download Stream and leave me a tip! 😃

Gotta say it, the Dutch Brothers Coffee app is really well done. It’s beautiful, stable, has a personality, and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. Lets you order and pay for coffee.

I wonder who makes it? Do they do all dev work in house or do they have a studio, like WillowTree, work on it? I’m super curious.

If you know, send a message my way, rob.fahrni@gmail.com.

Heh. Since everyone is posting their Spotify Wrapped stuff I’m gonna give y’all my top artists of 2024 from Apple Music.

This isn’t surprising, at all.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been nice and chilly this week and I’m here for it. It was a balmy 18F (-7C) when I woke up this morning.

I have to run out and help our daughter move some furniture then finish decorating the house with Christmas lights so I have to scramble to put this together this morning.

I hope you enjoy the links!

Maxwell Zeff • TechCrunch

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is reshaping social media, but advertising isn’t off the table

Bluesky is really catching fire all of a sudden. I’ve been finding more and more folks to follow and their Starter Pack feature is amazing! It allows you to share a list of folks to follow with anyone. Great feature. I hope Mastodon clones it. 😀

UPDATE 10:45AM: Mastodonian Jolly Jcrabapple (no relation) pointed out Mastodon DOES HAVE Starter Packs! Woo-hoo! 🥳

Harry Litman

But I have written my last op-ed for the Times. Yesterday, I resigned my position. I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons.

The Los Angeles Times has gone off the MAGA deep end. Their billionaire owner is bending the knee to the Orange Man and Space Karen.

Steven Monacelli and Tristan Lee • Texas Observer

REVEALED: THE OPERATORS BEHIND FOUR MAJOR NEO-NAZI X ACCOUNTS

Out Nazis. We don’t want or need them in this country. We created our own, smaller, version of Nazis with the Confederacy. I see enough of that crap here in The South, I don’t need Nazis to join in.

Nature

Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were ‘missing’ from archives — that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future (M. P. Eve J. Libr. Sch. Commun. 12, eP16288; 2024).

This report is eye opening and very sad. We’re losing so much information. Shared knowledge is a gift to the world. All of that hard work, lost. 😞

Jason Snell • Six Colors

Festivitas hangs holiday lights on your Mac

I’ve seen fun stuff like this in the past —- I had one once that would cause it to snow on your desktop. Go give Festivitas a look and support an Indie Dev if you like it. 🎅🏼

Kelly Crandall • Racer

A driver moving on from a race team is a lot like graduating from school. At the year’s end, loaned items need returning and lockers cleaned out. At some point, the open-door policy ends and the keycard access denied.

Michael McDowell is moving from Front Row Motorsports to Spire Motorsports. Spire has been making big moves. Picking up Carson Hocevar and firing Corey Lajoie in favor of McDowell. The team of McDowell and Hocevar should be pretty darned good next season.

JP Camara

There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python.

This is really cool. I love reads like this. While these improvements may not make a real difference in day-to-day use I’d personally still pursue these optimizations. If you have a great suite of unit tests you should feel very confident in the rewrite of small areas of code like this. Bravo! 👏🏼

Jason Snell • Macworld

For the last 10 years, I’ve worked at a desk at home, with a desktop Mac as my primary computer. But over the last year or so, I’ve been using my MacBook Air a lot more, whether I’m traveling or spending the winter in a heated room rather than my unheated garage.

For me it’s been about a MacBook Pro — I’ve had 15, 16, and 17in versions —with full-size monitor, keyboard, and mouse connected to it at my desktop since 2007’ish. Modern M based Mac’s are blazing fast. Perfect computers, really.

I feel like I’m being watched. 🤣