Rob Fahrni

This morning I managed to get back to Grit to work on Stream for Mac after a four week hiatus. I’ve been thinking about what I wanted and needed to do for a couple weeks now. The idea is to finish off my 1.0 release, which will most likely be labeled as 1.7.0 so I can sync it with the new release of Stream for iOS — which I also need to work on. 😁

I managed to get quite a few things buttoned up. If you logged a bug, thank you. I may not have fixed your bug or feature requests. At the end of a development cycle I get pretty conservative and want to do as little as possible to the code, unless someone finds a super egregous bug.

Unless I get a report of something terrible this may be the final beta. I really want to ship a solid Mac Assed Mac App but I’m not sure if I’ve met either of those desires unless I get a little help.

If you find a Mac Assed feature missing, please let me know. You can send email to rob.fahrni@gmail.com with your finding or you can go to GitHub and create a new issue. There’s also Mastodon. I’ll take a report any way I can get it. 😀

As for the latest TestFlight build — 1.6.0 (build 21) — here’s what changed.

• Added support for double-click to open an article its own window
• Adjusted sidebar collection view down so the scrollbar doesn’t run into the show/hide sidebar button
• Fixed a warning in the share view controller caused by a weak reference
• Added space bar to next or previous feed item support (JavaScript, ack!)
• Updated HTML to to properly handle video size (thanks, John!)
• Added error handling to Share Extension
• Update HTML rel=‘alternate’ parsing to look at entire HTML document if we can’t find a rel=‘alternate’ in head because YouTube is dumb 🫠

This is my first build using Xcode 27, so far, so good.

To all Stream users, thank you for your support! 🙏🏼 A hearty thank you to the Mac and iOS Dev community, Power User community, and Stream TestFlight groups for all of your help, you know who you are and I’m grateful for each and every one of you. There’s no way I could ship this without all of you.

Dave Rogers’ Nice Marmot

Republicans, “conservatives,” always, always like to make a big show of “supporting the troops.”

It’s bullshit. It’s performative bullshit by people who never served anyone but themselves. Republicans and conservatives and the MAGA crowd are unacquainted with the notion of honor. It’s absent from their lives. You reap what you sow.

I know people don’t like comparisons with Nazi Germany, but you should study how Hitler and the Nazi leadership employed their troops. We’re doing the same things.

Dave Rogers is a retired Navy Commander, all around great man, and a very good writer. I’ve been reading him for well over 20 years.

Subscribe to his work, I think you’ll like it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Manton Reece

I’ve started rolling out an AT Protocol PDS — personal data server — for new Micro.blog users. In the Bluesky world, a PDS is what stores your posts, follows, photos, and other data from apps. In the same way that creating an account on Micro.blog automatically gives you a fediverse handle, I wanted people to be able to create a Micro.blog account and have everything they needed to sign into Bluesky.

This is extremely cool. Manton continues to add support to Micro.blog for as many open protocols as is possible. He has support for plain old static HTML pages, RSS, JSON Feed, cross posting to other services like Mastodon, Micropub, Webmention, Microsub, IndieAuth, Standard Site, and now AT Protocol PDS.

It’s an incredible publishing platform — I use it for my blog — and it’s super inexpensive at $5.00US per month.

Daniel Jalkut • Red Sweater

MarsEdit 5.4.5 is now available on the MarsEdit site and on the Mac App Store.

This update is focused on performance and polish, with particular improvements to the speed of syntax highlighting and live preview updates. It also includes fixes for several issues that caused changes in the options panel not to be persisted when publishing a post. Finally, there are a good number of smaller fixes throughout the app:

This is my blogging tool of choice. Well, MarsEdit + Tot. 😀 MarsEdit works with a number of different blogging platforms so you can write and publish from one spot to multiple different places.

I use it for publishing to this site and for my Hayseed Blog, which is on WordPress. It also supports WordPress, Tumblr, Movable Type, and any blogging platform that supports XMLRPC, like Micro.blog.

It’s also very stable.

Congratulations on the new release, Daniel. 🥳

Grumpy Welshman

Apparently I write like a machine.

I’m 71.

That’s not an excuse.

It’s the explanation.

The Grumpy Welshman is a great writer so make sure you read his stuff. I linked to this piece after my brother experienced the same thing. He ran some of his writing through ChatGPT and it told him it was written by an AI. No, it wasn’t. It was written by Jerry Fahrni. He dumbed his writing down to appease the LLM.

Never, ever, do that. I’d suggest telling your readers you wrote it, not a pachinko machine.

A.R. Moxon

The story Musk tells himself about himself clearly includes the idea he is funny and epic. This is a problem for him, because he is, speaking objectively, a grotesque and discomfiting figure with the ghastly pale dead-eyed face of a frozen mackerel, the sense of humor of a badly-socialized pre-teen who enjoys setting frogs on fire, and a nose-snickering stammering delivery that makes milk curdle, babies cry, and causes nearby songbirds to lay eggs filled with spiders.

Space Karen. What more can be said about the billionaire baby? He fails, a lot, and has been give far too much praise for the success of others. He’s diabolical and doesn’t care about the human race. He just wants to get to Mars and use the letter X as often as he can.

Frank Landymore • Futurism

Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found.

These pages and individual creators posted content that appeared to be in clear violation of Facebook’s own hate speech policies. Nonetheless, they were able to earn money on their posts through the platform’s “Content Monetization” program — which is invitation-only.

Garbage company. Garbage CEO.

Abhijith M B • Windows Latest

Windows 11’s built-in Weather app is basically MSN adware wearing a forecast icon, and it uses about five times the RAM of macOS native Weather, all while showing ads on an OS you already paid for.

I wrote a bit about this the other day. I hope Microsoft really digs in, defines a new UI — no glass, please — and delivers a fast, stable, set of world class native applications that fully embrace a well defined set of standards. It was that way all the way back to Windows 1.0 and, for some reason, drifted as newer and newer versions of the OS shipped.

It’s now kind of a mess with critical bits of the operating system UI written in Electron. Such a strange choice.

Oh, and please, for the love of Pete, abandon that horrible ribbon UI. It’s absolutely terrible and junks up the UI.

Side note. When I stopped using Windows in 2006 I don’t believe the ribbon was a thing.

Wow, I’ve been using a Mac for 20+ years now. That’s crazy. 😳

Mike Masnick • TechDirt

But the thing I do remember was the first time I came across Derek Powazek’s Fray online magazine. It was the first time I had seen a website look beautiful. This was without CSS and without Javascript. I still remember quite clearly an “issue” of Fray that used frames to create some kind of “doors” you could slide open to reveal an article inside.

Wow, Derek Powazek. He’s still around but now he’s a farmer. I’m a fan of their Orange Spice Roller. I use it on my knee, ankles, whatever aches. 😀

Jeff Johnson • Lapcat Software

Ten years and one day ago, on August 9, 2016, I abruptly quit my job. I mark this occasion as the beginning of my indie software developer career. Happy anniversary to me and to my customers!

I remember when Jeff went Indie and the struggles he went trough. It wasn’t pretty to watch from the outside and I can’t imagine what he was feeling on the inside. But, in the end, things seem to have worked out of him, which is a relief.

I’m happy for you Jeff!

Ryan Scott • SlashFilm

When two cinematic legends cross paths, great things can happen. So, one might think that Tom Cruise starring in a movie from the venerated director Ridley Scott would be a recipe for success. Except, that’s not exactly how things played out when the two collaborated on the 1985 fantasy movie “Legend.” Though the film would eventually find more love, it was a box office flop during its initial theatrical run.

I liked Legend. I saw it in theaters and was taken with Tim Curry’s Darkness. It’s 100% the best portrayal of what we think of as the Devil in a traditional sense. Red skin, horns, and hooves.

He was kind of scary looking. And Tim Curry’s twisted mouth delivery of his lines was perfect.

Dave Winer

I want to connect RSS to AT Proto, both ways, inbound and out. Toward that end, today I helped Leaflet, a very nice editor for AT Proto, make their outbound RSS feed better. We should have all our best editors, everywhere, hooked up over popular web standards. And I want my posts to show up not only in Bluesky but also in standard.site. I was able to do that with micro.blog which is the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020’s.

High praise from Dave for Manton Reece, Micro.blog founder. As I said earlier, Micro.blog is a fine example of the open web.

Kelly Crandall • Racer

Blaney rolled out a new helmet this weekend that features various pictures from Busch’s career and different color elements to match paint schemes from Busch’s legendary career. It was shown for the first time during the USA Sports qualifying broadcast on Saturday.

I didn’t find time to watch the race live or recorded but it’s nice to see NASCAR continue to celebrate the life of Kyle Busch.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really have a favorite racer, but I often times pulled for Kyle Busch to win, as well as Kyle Larson. I wanted to see him get to 70 wins and retire. That would’ve been incredible.

The Kyle Busch Bow is legendary.

This weekend Ty Gibbs will be sporting a beautiful M&M’s livery on his 54. If you zoom in you can see a collage of his victories. A beautiful tribute. It’s too bad he didn’t run the 18 — Kyle’s old JGR number — on the side. I’d imagine that has issues of its own to deal with.

Mark Fallman • Mother Jones

On the morning of April 17, 2025, Phoenix Ikner was using ChatGPT to prepare. Over nearly three hours, the Florida State University student asked OpenAI’s popular chatbot eight questions about firearms and 11 others about mass shootings—including how the media and public would react to a potential attack at FSU.

ChatGPT responded in detail each time and encouraged Ikner to keep chatting. When he uploaded images of shotgun shells and a Glock pistol, it confirmed the shells were “extremely lethal at close range” and said his Glock would be “quick to use under stress.”

Folks who are already unstable do not need a chat bot encouraging them to do harm to others.

Is the AI race really worth all the damage its done? No, not really. Especially when you look at, not only this tragedy, but the environmental damage it’s doing to an already fragile planet.

Max Tani • Semafor

Spotify is terrifying much of the podcast industry with a tiny little widget.

Last week, the audio streaming giant tweaked its streaming interface, adding a feature that allows some users to more effectively skip through the parts of a podcast no one wants — notably ads, as well as promotions and filler content — as long as they aren’t sold directly by Spotify. Spotify cast the move as streamlining a feature that already exists, the 15-second skip button, which users in practice often use to bypass ads.

The best podcasts I listen to support chapters in their audio files so I can pick and choose what to listen to and what to skip. Some even include the ad reads as a chapter, so you can skip them. Sure, you get a little bit of the read in the next chapter, the important part that tells you where to get the deal and what code to use, but that’s it.

Hey, I use the skip ahead button a lot in Castro, even for podcasts that don’t provide chapters.

Is this really a way to kill off podcasts? I don’t think so. Remember, it’s not a podcast if it doesn’t have a feed. Platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts lock up your podcast behind a wall. It’s your content. If folks want to hear it they’ll find a way to locate it outside of Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Yes, I know, I know, distribution and visibility are why you use the platform. Find a way around it. Form your own distribution networks. Use the open web to your benefit. Podcasting is open. It doesn’t require a specific platform.

I’ve heard Scott Galloway on Pivot go on about how Podcasting is better than traditional media. He’s right to a point. Podcasts can very easily be recorded and produced by a single person in their bedroom. They do not require a team to get out the door. Just like the don’t require a specific platform to be successful. It just means that the podcasters may have to work harder to get attention. That’s just an open market, right? Sure, you’ll have some attrition but the podcasts people find and love will survive and thrive.

Now, if only I could figure out how to make my software survive and thrive, that would be quite an accomplishment. 😁

Ars Technica

What started out as a personal email project has become a large-scale effort to warn businesses and other groups that they have misconfigured their internal systems and are accidentally sharing sensitive information. Solovewicz, who presented his work at the Defcon security conference yesterday, says ultimately he is relieved that he ended up with the domains rather than criminal hackers or nation states who could use the data maliciously.

“I did not realize that this was going to be as big of a problem as it is,” says Solovewicz, who is not publicly naming impacted entities. The researcher has been alerting affected companies of their problems, encouraging them to fix the errors and misconfigurations. “I just want companies and organizations to do the right thing and to be auditing their systems and fixing their stuff.”

Wow. This is crazy but also very cool. At least Mr. Solovewicz is not a scum bag criminal doing odious things with the data.

We’re all very lucky he’s the one with the domain names. 🍀

Jeffrey M. Jones • Gallup

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.

This doesn’t surprise me given all the negative attention AI data centers, in particular, have received over the past couple years. When you have scumbags like Musk and Zuckerberg building fast and loose they’re bound to cut corners and ignore environmental regulations.

They should know better. Go beyond what’s required. Be a model for how to build data centers. Make them environmentally friendly. Solve the water problem and supply your own power. Heck, make your neighbors love you by making your data centers silent, no light pollution, no water pollution, and add electricity back to the grid for their sake.

Be a real neighbor, not a taker.

Today marks 39 years my lovely bride has put up with me.

I’m very grateful and love her more now than ever. ❤️

Windows Latest

Microsoft is already putting effort into dumping legacy Win32 and WebView2 code across Windows 11 in favor of WinUI, and also admitted native apps still use more RAM than they should.

I still like Windows and owe much of my long career to it. When I started writing Windows applications I was using C and the Windows API — most folks call it Win32 API but when I started on Windows 3.1 it was 16-bit. It’s not a bad procedural API. It’s pretty feature rich and works the way you’d expect. We had a little GUI tool for building dialogs and the like that allowed you to make pixel perfect UIs and the API would load it from resources using an ID you defined. You had to write all the code to hook it up and answer messages to it. It was very straight forward.

In 1995 I wrote a C++ wrapper around Window and Dialog creation along with other helpers, like a String class, and started using that for writing apps. It used a dynamic map for defining message handlers as methods on your derived class and, in my opinion, was tiny and really easy to use.

The archived code — called ACLLib — is on GitHub.

I know nothing about WinUI 3 but once I read that Rudy Huyn at Microsoft was committing to forming a team to do native apps I wanted to get a job there again.

Working on making the Windows UI consistent, use less RAM, and use updated native frameworks sounds like a very rewarding job. Difficult, but rewarding.

If you’re familiar with Win32 you can see how Microsoft switched the native Windows Calculator app to WinUI 3 on GitHub because they open sourced it.

There’s plenty of straight old C code in there written who knows how many years ago but the UI was fully updated. A very nice way to do it.

Remember, old working code isn’t your enemy. updating the UI made complete sense but leaving that working C code alone was smart. ❤️

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