Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Steve Rose • The Guardian

In April, Gil Durán was permanently banned from Elon Musk’s X for posting just two words. Durán was responding to a post from the tech company Palantir outlining its 22‑point “technological manifesto”, which praised American “hard power”, western culture and AI weapons, denounced inclusivity and called for compulsory national service. Durán responded: “TLDR: Fascism” (TLDR is short for “too long, didn’t read”).

The tech oligarchs — broligarchs — are a danger to us all. They have waaaay too much money and in cases are pusing an extreme right-wing agenda. Space Karen and his friend Peter Thiel are particularly extreme in their beliefs.

We simply don’t need them in charge of anything to do with how we live our lives.

Curtis Yarvin is ready to employ volunrary euthanasia — Nazi’s called it Lebensunwertes Leben — to deal with what he calls unproductive citizens. Yeah, it’s a Nazi thing.

Get lost, all of you.🖕🏼

Kasta Andreadis • TweakTown

According to Taiwanese outlet DigiTimes, citing “industry insiders” as the source, the big three memory suppliers have reportedly allocated all of 2027’s DRAM and HBM capacity. Essentially, this means that all memory on track to be manufactured in 2027 by Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron is now sold out, with no additional supply planned.

If this reporting is accurate I wonder if we’re in for an additional increase in RAM prices or will “older” devices with more modern RAM become extremely valuable? I heard someone in a podcast a few days back describe a newer, fully loaded, Mac Mini for sale on eBay as “costing as much as a new car.”

I’m glad I managed to get my MacBook Air when I did. I’m writing on it this morning and it’s a great little machine. I was able to build Stream in no time at all. It’s kind of perfect and I hope it lasts me, at a minimum, five years. I’d love to stretch it out to 10 years. 🤞🏼

Felix Rieseberg

I dedicated years bringing web technologies and desktop apps closer together. The most recent and most successful project in that vein is Electron, which I’ve spent the last ten years working on.

There is zero doubt Electron is extremely attractive to developers for a number of reasons, least of which is the idea of running one codebase on multiple platforms.

When you’ve poured a great deal of time into a technical solution like Electron I can see why you’d defend it. It’s extremely useful and the work Felix has done over the last 10 years is incredible. As a developer who loves building SDKs for others to use I know where he’s coming from. Tooling for the masses is very rewarding.

Most apps today are based in the browser. From a 30,000 foot perspective Electron wraps that site in a dedicated application. I know it’s more than that, but from a very high level you could look at it that way.

I know a lot of folks railed on 1Password’s conversion to Electron. It was surprising given their history of building great Mac client apps but it works fine and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

When your business isn’t building platform specific applications that cross platform framework is very attractive. 💻

Scott McNulty

You don’t need me to tell you that Ray Bradbury was a great writer. One of this most famous stories, amongst many famous stories, is “There Will Come Soft Rains.” It tells the story of a smarthome at the end of the world. It is quite moving, and takes place on August 4th, 2026.

It looks like Mr. Bradbury could see into the future! 🔮

Matt Mullenweg

Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders.

I think Matt nails it. WordPress started life as a blogging tool and soon became so much more. I don’t think it’s bloated or anything but as a blogger all I need is a simple text editor so I can write in Markdown and a way to publish. I use Tot to compose my posts, since it autosaves, and publish via MarsEdit.

A simplified user interface for WordPress, targeted to writers, would be nice. See the work Dave Winer’s been doing with WordLand. The editor is super simple and does what you’d expect from a blogging tool.

Lake Hope

I am very sorry that the software that I created and put online for free, without any warranty, explicit or implied, has not met your expectations. You are entitled to a full refund. I have taken the liberty to initiate it. You should already have it.

A look inside one open source developer’s struggles. These folks are software engineering heros. They do this work because they love it, not to become wealthy, and folks can often be real jerks to them.

Elizabeth Tai

🎩 Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman

Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like Tumblr. Then it was Medium. More recently, it’s been Substack.

Elizabeth makes a great case for owning your own domain and choosing an open platform so you can take your data with you, easily, if you choose to move.

But, you should absolutely not use Substack given their support of terrible organizations.

Whakkee

I’ve no idea yet where my blog will head to in the future. Not sure if I’ll end up posting regularly or occasionally. Not sure if it will still (all) be tech related, or (also) about other stuff. If I make myself decide about a direction first, that means that I block myself from posting about other stuff, and I don’t need any more barriers.

My blog is just random stuff. I post pictures, short blurbs, and longer posts (like this one.) Those posts are published to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr.

Write whatever you want and publish. That’s my opinion. 😁

Yakov Manshin

Seven years after its blockbuster 2019 announcement, SwiftUI was supposed to be the mature, production-grade future of cross-platform UI development on all Apple platforms. Instead, SwiftUI feels like a perpetual beta, even in 2026. In this deep dive, I break down why the initial excitement has given way to deep professional frustration for senior engineers. I analyze the systemic issues with performance and layout predictability, the chaotic state of SwiftUI’s ever-changing data flow, and the frustrating lack of backward compatibility that forces developers into a nightmare of shims and workarounds.

Scathing review of SwiftUI. Watch the YouTube video. It’s good.

My use of SwiftUI in Stream is only going to grow. It’s used in a single spot in Stream for Mac and I’d imagine folks won’t notice when they use the app. I plan on doing any new iOS and Mac work in SwiftUI. I don’t see replacing the existing UIKit and AppKit code because it works. My plan is to do supporting UI like dialogs in 100% SwiftUI and leave the main UI bits alone until Apple tells me everything is going to break. This has happened in the past, see the Carbon API’s for more information. Thankfully my apps are tiny. 😁

Fedi.Tips

If you have a WordPress blog, you can turn it into a Fediverse server, which means people will be able to follow the blog and comment on it from Mastodon etc.

Yep! This totally works! My test blog — Bahookey — is configured to work as a Mastodon server and you can carry on conversations on the Fediverse just like you would with any other Mastodon instance. The UI is very different but it works fine.

I’d love to have a feature added to WordPress that allows you to log in using a Mastodon client like Ivory or Mona and use it for replying. Baby steps.

Jeremy Laird • PC Gamer

Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft, recently made an appeal on X (via Windows Latest) for software devs to form a new team that will build Windows apps. When queried over the specific nature of those apps, Huyn was very clear. “100% native”, he said.

I wonder how this is working out? I think it’s encouraging to see Microsoft eat its own dog food and I hope they’re fully embracing WinUI 3 and building beautiful native applications.

Google Security

We’re living through a massive shift in the software security industry. Large Language Models (LLMs) are unlocking unprecedented capabilities for automated vulnerability discovery, scaling far beyond the limits of human security expertise, and requiring new approaches for staying ahead of attackers.

This means deploying AI models at scale to find and fix hundreds of security bugs, faster than ever, with the goal of achieving greater resilience and comprehensive remediation.

Here’s how we’re doing it.

They’re using AI, a lot, for Chrome development. Take some time to read through how they’re using it. This stuff can be configured in so many ways it’s incredible.

Security fixes alone will make AI worth the effort.

Say, has anyone at Apple used AI to do a port of WebKit to Swift? 🤔 That would be very interesting, but I’d imagine noone has the time for experiments like that.

Pagecord Blog

Blogs always used to have comments, but they went out of fashion for a while. Well, now they’re hot again and fully supported in Pagecord Premium! 🔥

Pagecord continues to imporove as a blogging platform. Olly is killing it! 👍🏼

Ethan Anderton • SlashFilm

With a box office haul of just over $76 million, “Violent Night” was a modest R-rated success, and that was enough to convince Universal to bring Santa back for another round. The first “Violent Night 2” trailer has just arrived, expanding the lore of St. Nick by introducing his wife, played by “Frozen” star Kristen Bell. When it comes to Santa Claus being on the naughty list, losing his powers, and being forced to reckon with a mall full of armed criminals led by Jared Harris (“Chernobyl”), Mrs. Claus isn’t simply going to … let it go. (See what we did there?)

We loved this film, I’m a fan of David Harbour. He was great in the first movie and I suspect he’ll be great in this one as well. Having Kristin Bell as Ms. Clause is nice.

We’ll be there. 🎅🏼

Ivan Mehta • TechCrunch

In its first acquisition since going public last month, Bending Spoons on Tuesday said that it has agreed to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash.

Bending Spoons is the place great applications and services go to die. I loved Evernote and used it for a long time. I abandoned it when they rewrote the apps. Their web clipper was the best in the business and it allowed me to save all kinds of stuff to read later. Stuff for blog posts and developer articles.

Now I split those between Unread and Plinky. Unread for saving articles to read later — for blog posts — and Plinky for longer term keeping. I also have quite a few items saved in Notion. So, yeah, Evernote served me well and I can’t see using it again. But who knows. 🤷🏻‍♂️ (Maybe I should try it again?)

Side note: I applied for a job at Evernote, interviewed, liked it, but I didn’t want to move to the Silicon Valley, so we ended the interview process there.

Emanuel Maiberg • 404 Media

⚠️ Content Warning: Politics

Caitlin Hornik • The Independent

“We might be asking too much of Trump to reopen the Strait of Hormuz when he can’t even reopen the pool in his backyard,” Fallon added.

Trump is the ultimate knucklehead grifter. What a job.

Something new and purdy just arrived! 😃

I’m stoked! I know what I’m doing tonight after everyone goes to bed. 😂

I’d mentioned earlier in the spring that Kim picks up two new hanging ferns every year so the birds can nest in them. This one has had two separate momma birdies choose it to birth and care for their young this year.

And yes, that’s a lot of poop! 🤣

Yesterday took us from Elk City, Oklahoma, to Jackson, Tennessee.

We traveled approximately 660 miles in about 10 hours. 🚙

Today we get back to Charlottesville, Virginia. Home. 🏡

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We’re on the road back home to Virginia this morning. I’m writing on my trusty iPhone using Tot — which is a great little writing app — and Bug is driving. We’re in the middle of New Mexico at the moment.

Yes, I’ve had coffee! From Gallup Coffee Company, of course. ☕️

I hope you enjoy the links.

Shirt Pocket

The new version of SuperDuper is a ground-up rewrite, a tip-to-tail reinvention of what SuperDuper looks like, how it works, what it can do, and where I can take it in the future.

Wow! Rewrites are dangerous things to a business but I’m glad Mr. Nanian was able to pull it off. I’m looking forward to my upgrade!

Jaob Jackson • The Register

Having built a SQLite-compatible database from scratch in Rust, cloud database provider Turso is attempting something more ambitious: a Postgres-compatible implementation on the same foundation.

I need to reread the article because I can’t remember if this Rust port will work on iOS and Mac. I’d like to give it a drive and see how it works for Stream.

I really need to update Stream to use CloudKit instead. 😃

Anthony L. Fisher • MS Now

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, thoroughly embarrassed himself last week during a mostly amicable interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the self-described “radical centrist” British newsmagazine The Economist. He displayed puddle-deep knowledge on subjects in which he claims expertise, a callous disregard to human suffering and a hair-trigger temper at being calmly challenged with demonstrable facts.

What can I say, Space Karen is still a piece of garbage human.

Why do folks bow down to a man so obviously full of himself? Because he’s rich? Screw that.

He’s a nasty human who needs to get lost somewhere. Preferably Mars. 🛸

Todd Spangler • Variety

Pixar Animation Studios, despite riding high on the success of summer blockbuster “Toy Story 5,” was hit particularly hard in a wave of companywide layoffs Tuesday at Disney.

Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. So darned sad.😞

Matt Birchler

However, in 2026, I think there’s a third contender. In addition to being a hardware company and a software company, Apple is very much a rent-seeking company. Based on how lots of people talk about Apple these days, that rent-seeking characteristic seems to be the only absolute hard requirement for them. Basically, unless the winds really change in the future, Apple will never make another computer where they don’t always collect 15-30% of all commerce that happens on that device.

We have the Ternus era coming soon. Fingers crossed he makes some changes to help developers. 🤞🏼

Dave Winer

WordPress now supports RSS.chat in an interesting way, and it’s surprisingly deep. Once it’s crossposted a message to RSS.chat, any comment in response will be cross-posted to the comment thread of the post on RSS.chat. What’s great about this is that you never can tell what people will do when you are on the web. Matthias is a friend, I was on his podcastlast year. If people use this connection and see how it works. Then we’ll get an idea of where to go next.

It looks like Dave’s new rss.chat is gaining some traction! LET’S GO RSS! 🥳

Joe Rossignol • Mac Rumors

Apple is facing a new lawsuit from three customers who allegedly lost a combined $1.8 million after falling victim to a fake Bitcoin wallet app in the App Store, according to a complaint filed in California federal court on Friday.

One of Apple’s big claims about the App Store is better security. But, bad actors can still manage to do bad things. It’s a real shame this had to happen and I hope Apple will make these people whole.

Manton Reece

I told someone privately this week that I’ve become disillusioned with Mastodon. For all the great work that fediverse developers are doing, and the fact that the fediverse is built on open standards, my concern is that Mastodon is a permanent niche. It’s going to take a monumental effort to change this.

Is being a niche all that bad? My blog is a niche, about two people read it, and Manton’s Micro.blog is also a niche market (at least I think it is) but it seems to keep a roof over his house and food in his belly.

I’m sure as hell not going back to X. What a terrible place run by a terrible human.

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

A new Gallup survey just revealed that seven out of 10 Americans oppose data centers built near their homes and communities — a massive jump from the 47% that objected to these projects in late 2025. According to The Washington Post, opposition towards these projects have become so intense that many of the respondents would rather live near a nuclear power plant.

Would rather live next to a nuclear power plant? 🤣

That’s pretty hated! They’ve dug themselves such a big hole based on their behavior folks are gonna hate them for a very long time.

Of course Texas and Tennessee will let you destroy everything in the name of a few bucks but places that care aren’t gonna put up with it.

Web 1 Land

Web 1 Land is a place for people who remember and love the best parts of the web—or people who missed that era and want to experience it today. It’s a place where you can have fun writing HTML without the overhead of today’s “modern” content publishing ecosystems. A place where you can be yourself, do your thing, and make your web pages.

Long live the open web!

Pure Blog

Pure Blog wasn’t born out of a desire to build yet another blogging platform. It came from more than a decade of writing online and constantly tweaking the tools I used along the way. After years of switching between platforms, building themes, and bending systems to fit how I like to write, I eventually reached a point where I knew exactly what I wanted from a blog, and what I didn’t.

When I find some time I think I’ll install this and give it a go! It should be easy to install at my provider.

We pull into Gallup, New Mexico, at 10PM local time last night. Totally pooped out. 🥱

Today we’re off to Elk City, Oklahoma. Much shorter day. We’re only covering 563 miles. 🚙

It’s hard to believe it’s August 1. Even one day on the road makes me forget what day it is. 🤣

Will I be able to write Saturday Morning Coffee on the road? Guess we’ll find out. 😃

Yesterday Bug and I visited San Luis Obispo, California, one of the many places our family has lived over the years. It’s a beautiful little town on the Central Coast. It’s not what most people think of when they think of the California coastline. That’s usually reserved for Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco.

We stopped to walk around Higuera street and have lunch at Firestone Grill. If you’re ever in San Luis Obispo, stop by for a meal, you’ll enjoy it.

Bug got the tri-tip sandwich and I got a tri-tip Cobb. We split a basket of half fries, half onion rings.

Needless to say it was a fantastic lunch. 🤤

We start our journey back home today.

Today’s leg takes us from Avila Beach, California to Gallup, New Mexico.

Looks like 811 miles with an estimated time of around 12 hours. 🚙

It will, of course, take longer. 😃

Some Hayseed, LLC, behind the scenes. 🤣

I operate my app empire under the name Hayseed and I have two products; RxCalc and Stream.

RxCalc

RxCalc is a Pharmacokinetics Calculator. It’s used to calculate how long drugs interact with the body. Go read about it. It is interesting.

My brother, Jerry, has a PharmD — Doctor of Pharmacy — and loves the more technical side of his profession, he’s a total geek and Chemistry undergrad so of course he loves stuff like that.

We collaborated on it in 2009 because he needed it for work. I did the app and he did the math. We paired to get it coded up and we were approved for the store on July 4, 2009.

It hasn’t changed in years and could use an update to add a new way of doing calculations.

Stream

Stream is an RSS or Feed Reader.

I built Stream because I love blogging and use a feed reader to consume others blogs and news sites. One of these days I’ll ship Stream for Mac! 🤣

I wanted Stream to be slightly different and I loved my Twitter app, Twitterrific from the Iconfactory, so I decided I’d like to have a feed reader that worked in timeline form. So, Stream was born. It presents your feeds in reverse chronological order as you’d see in Twitterrific. Posts from multiple sources are folded together so you can read casually. The initial release didn’t have a read/unread status but it was a highly requested feature so I added it.

Stream is FREE to use but if you like it you’re free to leave a tip. I appreciate every tip I receive. I have a feeling when I do get a tip it’s from a friend, love y’all. ❤️

I am grateful for any support I receive for my apps. Thank you. 🙏🏼

The feed reader app market is very crowded and you can find excellent readers from multiple companies. Here are a couple I use.

Unread

Unread is a beautifully designed and darned useful app from Golden Hill Software. The iOS App sports a swipe driven user interface, beautiful type, a stellar reader, and my favorite feature, a read later view. It’s labeled as Favorites but you can save random articles to it to read later. I use it multiple times a day. I use the list I build to inform my Saturday Morning Coffee post.

Oh, it also has its own syncing system that is really good! Highly recommended.

Tapestry

Tapestry comes from the amazing folks at Iconfactory. It’s more than a feed reader and is highly customizable.

You can add your everyday RSS feeds but you can also add Mastodon, Bluesky, or Reddit feeds to name a few.

As ever, the UI is beautiful and thoughtful. I use it on occasion just to admire their work. Iconfactory is a shop that embodies what it means to design beautiful, usable, highly performant, and stable software for Mac and iOS.

It is updated at a rapid pace and is evolving to allow you to reply to posts from other services. Like I said, powerful!

Also, highly recommended.

WHOA!

This is an incredible deal. The Iconfactory is offering to do Indie App icon design for $750.

That is dirt cheap, especially for the incredible work the Iconfactory delivers.

Yes, it was an instabuy for me. Yeah, yeah, my credit card couldn’t resist the price. Can I really afford it? No, not really. Especially when I don’t make a lot from my apps but when I see a deal like this from a premier design shop I have to jump at the opportunity.

If you’re in a spot where you can afford it you should visit their site, look at their amazing work, get the deal, and consider throwing them more work. They did the marketing illustrations for Stream when it was featured in the App Store. The first round of designs was perfect. I didn’t have to ask for any changes.

Please, support Indie Developers and Designers and hire the Iconfactory for your work. You will not regret it. ❤️

Day Four.

We left Gallup, New Mexico at 6:30AM local time outbound to Fresno, California. We arrived in Fresno at 6:30PM local time. It works out to 13 hours becuase we had a shift in time from the Central time zone (CST) to Pacific (PST).

We covered 783 miles or 1260 kilometers. I’m happy to be out of the car.

I’ve had trouble sleeping on this trip for some reason. Last night I slept like a baby. I woke up at 5:30AM on my own, no alarm needed, which was nice.

While we’re here I’m trying to stay as close to Eastern time as possible so I can work with my co-workers on their time.

The nice thing about that is I’m off earlier because of the three hour time difference.

Today is a long one.

Gallop, New Mexico to Fresno, California.

Estimated 11 hours, 775 miles or 1,247 kilometers.

Day three, check. ✅

We blew out of Elk City, Oklahoma at 6AM and arrived in Gallup, New Mexico, at 3:15PM local time.

We covered 563 miles or 862 kilometers.

Tomorrow is another long drive. More in the morning.

Today we head to Gallup, New Mexico. I love the desert. Still tired. 😂

Day two in the books.

We arrived in Elk City, Oklahoma at 5PM local time, Saturday. It was a much shorter drive, we only covered 532 miles or 856 kilometers.

Being tired is kind of the norm on roadtrips for us but it feels really great to have a shorter day.

Dropped by a Scooter’s Coffee here in Maumelle, Arkansas. It’s good! ☕️

WillowTree did the Scooter’s app. 😃 Unfortunately I didn’t get to work on it but boy-o-boy did the team do an amazing job!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

On the road with our youngest daughter, Bug. I’m passenger for the first couple hours because I have a difficult time waking up. 🤣 Hey, I’ve only had a single cup of coffee this morning!

We’re on the road to California to visit family, Bug will visit friends while I work. Of course we’ll make the rounds to all of our old haunts just to see how things have changed in the area.

Our old favorite coffee shop, Exeter Coffee Co, shuttered at the end of last year. It was a sad affair. Nothing replaced it. But, we’ll be in Fresno with my brother and there are lots and lots of great coffee joints to choose from.

It’ll be really nice to just sit around and chat with my brother and my sister-in-law. It’s been too long.

I hope you enjoy the links.

RNZ

Kiwi actor Sir Sam Neill has died, his family has announced.

R.I.P Mr. Neill. I’ll bet everyone knows him from his role as Dr. Allen Grant in Jurassic Park but I remember hime for his roles in In the mouth of Madness and Event Horizon.

God’s speed. 🪦

Ed Zitron

The AI bubble isn’t a result of any actual return on investment — whether that be in purely monetary terms, like revenue or profitability , productivity gains, or anything tangible or measurable. Rather, it’s an episode of cult-like psychosis that infected the brains of some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals and institutions, where the powerful mythology of a company inspired — and been used to inspire — the greatest capital misallocation in history. 

Worth a read if you have a few minutes.

Louie Mantia • Parakeet

Because app icons from the Mac OS X era are so beloved, it’s very understandable—relatable even—how mandating rounded square app icons is downright heartbreaking to long-time Mac OS X users.

Louie talking about icons and their construction is an educational experience. He really is an expert on the subject and one of the best icon designers in the world.

Another great read from him. This time through the Parakeet company blog instead of his own.

Karl Bode

Like most fascist or fashy-adjacent tech bros (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg), Substack execs previously tried to hide behind pseudo-noble claims they just really love free speech. In reality, they’re turning a blind eye to hateful, white supremacist, anti-trans ideology and bigotry to make an extra buck.

So if I see someone building a new media company on the back of Substack in 2026 – especially if you’re purporting to be an ethical, truthful author with a keen grasp of politics and modern media – I’m going to have questions.

It’s nice to see someone else on the anti-Substack train. There are so many great writes using this crummy, fascist, platform and the only logical conclusion I can come to is they’re being paid lots of money up front to host there.

If they’re not then why the hell are they selling their soul to this soulless company? I don’t get it.

GET OFF SUBSTACK!

Lora Kolodny, Jeniece Pettitt • CNBC

Today, the noise from Colossus II and its gas-burning turbines is “like a form of torture,” said Jason Haley of Southaven, Miss., whose house is within a mile of the site. Southaven is part of the Greater Memphis area.

I really dislike Elon Musk. He’s a piece of garbage human who cares about who knows what. At one point he talked about “Saving the human race.” But all he really seems to care about is making lots of money.

Mars is a fantasy. Get over it, Space Karen. Work on saving this planet because it’s the ONLY one we can survive on.

Polluting our environment in pursuit of your Mars fantasy is disgusting.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.

When FOX bought Roku I was ready to purchase an Apple TV but I held off because the hardware was so old. Now I’m really kicking myself.

The whole memory shortage thing is just killin’ everyone. We’ll never find out directly from Apple but I would love to know how the price increases are hitting sales?

thomas0 • Lobste.rs

This past Saturday, @pushcx and I deployed the SQLite pull request to production. We were waiting till this morning to see how it would react to the Monday traffic spike before making this post. Needless to say, SQLite seems to have passed with flying colors: cpu usage is down, memory usage is down, site seems to be snappier at least for me, 1/2 the vps cost once mariadb vps is taken down, and finally “We’re having a quiet Monday.”. Finally #539 Migrate to SQLite was closed this morning.

I had no idea you could have multi-process access to SQLite? When I was working on Pelco’s API for camera, decoder, encoder, and NVR access I chose to use SQLite as the backing database for things we needed to cache. I did it because it was a zero configuration option. Just build an app and our API would take care of device caching and other things. Magic! Ok, ok, not magic, but it was super simple to use.

The downside we hit at the time was we couldn’t have multiple processes accessing it simultaneously. It seems like we could’ve and I just couldn’t figure out how to make that happen! Bummer. But, all that code has been retired by now, so it’s moot. 😃

PZ Myers

Isn’t that sweet? Pete Hegseth is imposing mandatory testosterone testing, but is not requiring testosterone supplements, yet. As we all know, good soldiers are in a constant roid-rage, and can be recognized by their chronic bacne.

Gender affirming care for soldiers!🤣 Hegseth is such a bro and shouldn’t be in a leadership role anywhere, much less the DOD.

He’s failed on Iran and now he needs to up the testosterone of soldiers? Like everything else MAGA it makes no sense.

A decrease in testosterone is a part of life. I loved lifting weights and as I got into my 40’s I found I was having a difficult time recovering from my workouts. Turns out my testosterone was decreasing. It just happens as we age.

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 and 2 data centers are in hot water for allegedly using unpermitted mobile natural gas turbines to generate the power they need. But even though he also owns a solar power generation and large-scale battery storage business through Tesla Energy, Electrek reports that he instead doubled down on mobile generators after purchasing APR Energy. It’s not exactly known how much Musk paid for the company, but disclosures revealed that he spent more than $50 million on the 5% stake held by a minority shareholder. This meant that he likely poured at least a billion dollars into the entire firm if every shareholder received the same amount.

Space Karen, again. Polluting the only planet we’er aware of that can support human life.

All data centers must be required to bring their own clean power and a closed loop system that doesn’t pollute water. They also have to be required to limit noise pollution along with air and water pollution. All of it.

I don’t know if y’all remember the whole eco-terrorism movement but I’m shocked they haven’t hit these sites.

Matthew Haughey

The public betas of both MacOS 27 and iOS 27 were released this week to the general public, and they coincide with the third release of developer betas. The first few developer betas I’ve used were pretty buggy. But now that I’m on the third version I can definitely say this year is weird and slightly unstable and you probably want to skip them until September when the final versions come out (hopefully they fix all the bugs I’m seeing now).

I have iOS 27 installed on my old trusty iPhone 11 and haven’t seen anything egregious but I don’t use it all that much. I trust Matthew’s experience so buyer beware!

Look, it’s never been safe to use BETA software. Never. Not even Apple’s software.

Today’s leg of the trip takes us from Forrest City, Arkansas, to Elk City, Oklahoma.

Short jaunt.

Day one in the books.

We pulled into Forrest City, Arkansas, at 8:30PM CST, so it was 9:30 in Charlottesville.

That comes to 14.5 hours of driving, including breaks for gas, food, and other things. Approximately 718 miles, or 1,155 kilometers.

We’re both pooped out. This is the longest day of the trip. Tomorrow will be quite a bit shorter but still productive.

Good night.

Our youngest daughter and I are headed out on our drive cross country to California.

Today we go from Charlottesville, Virginia to Forest City, Arkansas.

Total estimated time: 12h 2m

This is our little chipmunk friend, Chippy. He’s been around for at least three years now and he’s super cute.

I love watching him run around the yard. Recently I thought the little fella moved away. He didn’t, he just moved to the back yard!

We have a little bunny visiting our back yard. Cute little dude.

Got a little helper.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to talk about this week. I got a haircut and had a bunch of random thoughts about blogging and feed readers. 🤣

Of course I’d still like to make a living working on Feed Readers and Blogging tools. Someday, oh yes, someday. 😃

Jason Snell • Macworld

That’s my long way of saying that this is my last More Color column at Macworld. Thank you so much to everyone at Macworld for the chance to keep my name attached to this brand for an additional 11 years on top of the 17 I spent in my first life as an editor. Thanks to my editor, Roman Loyola, who was already working at MacUser magazine on my first day there in 1994 and is somehow still working with me. And thanks to all of you for reading my words here over the years. I’ll keep bleeding six colors&xcust=1-0-3175482-1-0-0-0-0&sref=https://www.macworld.com/article/3175482), and I know that you will, too.

The bad news is the Macworld reading crowd will, I’m sure, miss Jason’s work. The good news is, he has Six Colors. As a subscriber I’m hopeful it will continue publishing far into the future.

Thanks for your dedication to the Mac and the Mac using community, Jason!

See you over at Six Colors.

Jarred Sumner • Bun Blog

What if, instead, I spend a week testing if Anthropic’s new model can rewrite Bun in Rust?

At first, I didn’t expect it to work. A few days in, a high % of the test suite started passing and I saw how much the new Rust code matched up with the original Zig codebase. My opinion went from “this is worth trying” to “I’m going to merge this”.

Bun is one of those projects that fascinates me. One fella on a mission managed to create a beloved product and continues to love and care for it today, albeit with better resources.

If you’re a software engineer you owe it to yourself to read this article. It goes into great detail how the porting process used Claude Fable to great effect.

Hats off to Jarred for undertaking such a risky port and for teaching us how to use Claude for extremely deep work. It really is impressive.

Ben Gutierrez • Hawaii News Now

Hundreds gathered along Magic Island and Ala Wai Boat Harbor Friday to watch solo rower Kelsey Pfendler complete her record-breaking journey from California to Hawaii.

With all the war and political upheaval in the world it’s nice to see the human spirit of adventure survive and thrive. Congratulations to Kelsey Pfendler on an amazing feat of human strength and endurance. Not only did she make it across she destroyed the prior record of 52 days by nine days, coming in at 43 days to accomplish the feat. Wow! 🥳

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”

Mr. Zeldman has been writing a lot more over the last six months and I for one am here for it. I’ve always loved his openness, honesty, beautiful writing, and his technical prowess.

We owe a lot to Mr. Zeldman for his steadfast nurturing of web standards and the open web. Keep on keeping on Mr. Zeldman!

Louie Mantia • Parakeet Blog

Last week, Luka and I worked with the hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast—Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa—to design new Liquid Glass icons for their apps. Each submitted their own brief, and we created icons to meet their expectations and look exemplary on macOS 27 and iOS 27.

These icons are beautiful! 😍 It’s so nice to see professionals at the top of their craft.

The ATP boys talked about the icons on Episode 699: Not the Correct Squircle

If I had to pick a favorite from the collection it’s a tossup between John’s SwitchGlass and Marco’s Overcast icons. I suppose my absolute favorite is Overcast’s alternate teal icon. The blue circle in the main icon is also really nice!

I wish Apple would remove the squircle jail from macOS so John could use his original SwitchGlass icon. It’s gorgeous.

Oh, and I agree with John’s take that your icon should be better than your app! I honestly think that’s why Stream is downloaded. The icon is gorgeous (yeah, I’m biased. 😃)

(Y’all didn’t think you’d get away scot free of a Stream mention today, did you? 🤣)

Hugo Rojas • Ecoportal

Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said solar made no sense, and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys

How ‘bout those Swiss? 🤣

I suppose if you’re gonna have a manmade dam high up in the Alps you might as well make good use of it, right?

Bring on the solar! 🌞

Oh, and speaking of the Swiss. They meet Argentina tonight in the World Cup Quarterfinals. They’ll definitely have their hands full! Let’s go!

Daring Fireball

It’s one thing for Apple to force all of its own app icons into the same identical shape. That would be bad enough, because Apple’s own Mac apps are numerous and popular, and as the platform owner Apple necessarily sets the direction that many third-party apps follow. But it’s just downright spiteful to enforce it platform-wide.

Maybe if we make enough noise in the Mac and iOS community Apple will give us the ability to have icons outside of the squircle again?

Me complaining won’t help but if enough of the Mac punditry, well known Mac fans, and Mac developers make enough noise, maybe? 🤞🏼

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

A new app called HyperTexting is making it as easy to surf the web as it is to scroll through a social media feed, like Facebook or X. The app, newly available for iOS, also aims to make updating your own personal website as simple as sending a text message.

Wow! Yet another beautiful entry in the feed reading family. This is a really nice take on feeds as social timelines and it takes things a bit farther by allowing you to post to your blog. Yes, this is yet another feature on the already extremely long Stream todo list. 🤣

Steve Inskeep • NPR

If you’re listening closely, the lyrics of “Born in the U.S.A.” make its subject pretty clear: The 1984 hit by Bruce Springsteen describes a Vietnam War veteran who returns home to desperate circumstances and few options. Listen only to its surging refrain, though, and you could mistake it for an uncomplicated celebration of patriotism. You wouldn’t be the only one.

It’s a high energy song performed by a high energy performer but it’s really depressing if you listen to the lyrics. It’s the experience of a lot of our vets. They come home to nothing without hope. Those transitions have to be brutal in a country that celebrates service but it stops when people need it the most. They need that support when they’re back in civilian life.

Donna Wentworth • Lenergy

From 1 July 2026, energy retailers in NSW, South Australia, and South-East Queensland must give households at least three hours of free electricity every day. No solar panels required. No need to own your home. You just need a smart meter and to opt in through your retailer to have access to free daytime electricity

Ahhhh, more smart use of solar. The older I get the more I’d like socialized medicine and education and I think I’ll add power to that list. We all need power to run our lives. Having a single, stable, protected, shared power grid seems like a natural candidate to socialize. Doesn’t it?

Of course it’ll never happen because ‘murica. 🤣

Andrew Webster • The Verge

After muscling its way into the console space nearly 25 years ago, Microsoft’s gaming division is at its lowest point ever. And the fallout from some disastrous decisions is going to get very ugly in the coming weeks and months.

The whole Xbox thing is a real mess. First buy up a bunch of studios, then declare you’re focusing on PCs, then declare Xbox is no more, then name a new head of Xbox who turns around and declares it’s here to stay.

Now we get layoffs and studio spinouts. Wild. I hope the folks who were let go find a good home and the new small studios are able to stay afloat.

Apple, if ever you wanted to do some games work for the Mac now could be a good time to pickup some people to do the work. John Siracusa and Quinn Nelson have made good arguments for it. But this is Apple. They don’t do serious gaming even though they make serious gaming dev tools.

Hey, Mr. Ternus, it could be a way to get into more homes and make more cold hard cash that adds to that “shareholder value.” 🤣

Jordan Novet • CNBC

Microsoft is eliminating 4,800 jobs, representing 2.1% of its workforce, with the company’s Xbox division losing about one-fifth of its staff in the software giant’s latest effort to cut costs in the era of artificial intelligence.

More on the Microsoft Xbox debacle. It’s all AI or bust these days. Let’s jam it into everything whether it needs it or not.

Yes, I have thoughts and opinions on AI in everything, but that’s for another day.

Julie Johnson • San Francisco Chronicle

On a historic Santa Rosa street, neighbors have been watching a redwood tree grow like a living monument over years, decades, lifetimes. They’ve seen the slow-motion work as its roots muscled large chunks of concrete sidewalk up from horizontal placings into a nearly vertical, catawampus mess. 

The sidewalk is impassable and has been for years. This spring, the city issued the property owner a permit to cut down the tree and restore the sidewalk. It’s the cleanest solution, but one that spurred a passionate neighborhood campaign to save the towering redwood tree with a 4-foot-wide trunk that they now call Rosie.

I’d like to see this tree saved but I can understand why they may need to cut Rosie down. It’s a real bummer of a situation. Too bad they can’t, or won’t, use the Japanese technique of nemawashi to relocate it. See below! 😃

The Times of India

Before a tree is moved, specialists carefully prepare its root system to improve its chances of surviving in a new location. The technique, known as nemawashi, combines centuries of horticultural knowledge with modern engineering and reflects Japan’s long-standing respect for nature and cultural heritage.

This is incredible. The Japanese, like Native American’s, really embrace nature. It’s a beautiful thing and we need more beautiful things in this world.

Joe Wilkins • Futurism

As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.

Ouch. Yes, we still need to exercise our brains. LLMs are just another tool, not the only tool. Your bain is the best tool you have. Nourish it.

Good thing my fingers don’t need to read the keys to do their job.