Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We’re expecting a snow and sleet event this morning. As I was composing this post it started raining around 6:30AM and it’s below freezing. Here’s hoping we don’t lose power and have frozen roads later. 🥶
I hope you enjoy the links.
Colleen Long • The Associated Press
President Joe Biden will stress democracy is still a ‘sacred cause’ in a speech near Valley Forge
If TFG wins we may become an authoritarian nation. Kiss freedoms we’ve come to expect — like the horrible reversal of Roe v. Wade — to become the norm. I’d expect to see jailed political rivals and journalists. The Justice Department and Military will become law enforcement. With the law being his Orangeness.
No thank you.
Brynn Tannehill • The New Republic
The Polls Prove It: Many Republicans Love Fascism
So, yeah, fascism is the new GOP policy and Republicans across the nation love it.
That’s sickening.
Niklaus Wirth, Inventor of Pascal, Dies At 89
I never learned Pascal but know plenty of developers who made their career using it. 🪦
On Tuesday, I told subscribers that we are considering leaving the platform based on the company’s recent statement that it would not demonetize or remove openly Nazi accounts.
Bravo Casey! I wasn’t planning on linking to any Substack content but I had to break that rule for this piece. Casey is planning on doing something about Substack’s horrible position by, potentially, taking his publication and subscribers elsewhere. That’s very brave given it’s how he makes his living! ❤️
Now, if we can get other writers to follow that would be amazing.
Japan earthquake: Nearly 250 missing as hope for survivors fades
Our world has become such a mess the tragedy unfolding in Japan doesn’t even register as big news, at least that’s how it feels to me.
34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen”
Great explainer video of how the true Tetris Kill Screen was finally reached.
Also, I had no idea Tetris was still such a big deal. Silly me, of course it is! 🧱
I thought I’d be sharing photos of pintxos and more Basque lettering from Donostia-San Sebastián, and diving into our early experiences of living abroad.
My friend Ashur had planned a big adventure that didn’t quite work out as planned. It’s a worthwhile read and proves things don’t always go as planned.
David McCabe and Tripp Mickle • The New York Times
The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.
Some of the things the Justice Department are interested in seen really strange to me. Like allowing access to the Messages Service. Why should Google, or whoever else, be given the keys to access Messages backend services? Apple created and runs that service. It’s not built on a free to use, government backed, open-to-the-public utility. It’s paid for and maintained by Apple.
Now, if by access the government means Apple has to open it up as a paid service, I could see that. Perhaps Google agrees to take on some of the cost burden, based on usage, or pay Apple some huge fee so Android users have full access to Messages with a native messaging app built by Google. That wouldn’t be so bad. Another alternative is for Apple to build a Messages app for Android and sell access to the service as a monthly subscription. Hey, Apple, that means more service revenue! 😁
The whole App Store payment kerfuffle is something a lot of developers would like to see changed. I think most developers don’t want to pay Apple 15-30% of their potential revenue. That can be a lot of cheese for many Indie developers. There are some things Apple could change to help the situation, like allowing developers to actually tell users to visit their website to sign up or subscribe to their service. E.G. Amazon and Netflix cannot tell new users, through their app UI, to visit their website to get started. For a company who prides themselves on simplicity and great user experience sure do make it difficult for third-party apps to be easy to use.
Anywho, I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the Justice Department taking action against Apple and fallout from it.
So at the beginning of a new year, I’m going to remind myself that I’m too old and not paid well enough (I’m not paid at all, heh) to do another year of this kind of work. I should be making writing and reading tools work better on the web. That’s my mission.
Dave has been an innovator all his adult life. Whether it was scripting on the Mac and Windows or creating widely used technology like RSS and podcasting. Since he sold weblogs.com and left UserLand he’s continued to build writing tools of various kinds. His latest venture is FeedLand. It’s a feed reader and more. I can personally see it as a mechanism to follow and find excellent podcasts for a podcast player. Yes, it has an API that could be used for such things and it has full search capability. Bet you didn’t see that use case coming!
Anywho, I hope you get some rest, Dave, and have a wonderful 2024 making the web a better place for writers.
Keep digging!
Back in the ’00s you would download a feed reader and subscribe to feeds. This felt a lot like an early version of social media. Google Reader was killed in 2013, which was largely seen as the death of RSS. I think social media generally replaced RSS because it took far fewer technical skills to setup a Facebook account versus an RSS-enabled blog.
This is interesting because it uses Mastodon as a feed reader. That’s not a bad idea, really. It’s such a good idea to have a timeline based reader I made one! 😁
All the stuff Tim says about Facebook and other social media platforms is 100% accurate. Those platforms stood in for blogs because of their low barrier to entry. Quite honestly I’m surprised Facebook never embraced blogging as a true feature of its platform, complete with all the expected bells and whistles, and that includes RSS and posts that don’t require a Facebook login to read them.
Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what’s getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we’re instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse.
There was a time, not that long ago, folks said things like “RSS is dead” or asked “Is RSS dead?” First off, it’s just a technology, so it can’t actually die. Second, its web fabric and has been since its inception. It’s boring stuff — this is not a dig or insult, it’s a compliment. It’s as boring as HTML or CSS. I’d imagine it’s been used for all sorts of stuff beyond blogs over its history and it’ll probably be around for as long as we have a web to browse.
Sure social media, or microblogging, took center stage for a while. My own blogging slowed for a long period of time because I started posting little blurbs of text to Twitter instead of my blog.
Now I do that with a combination of Mastodon and Micro.blog. Short posts go to Mastodon and Micro.blog and long posts, like this one, go to my blog with a link on many services including Mastodon , Micro.blog, Blue Sky, and Tumblr.
My blog is at the center. It’s my content, I own it.
Here’s an uncomfortable question: when do I stop blogging?
I always find this question odd. I figure I’ll stop when, or if, I just stop one day. I suppose folks who do it professionally have to think about stuff like this, especially if they have subscribers and/or advertisers.
Maybe when the day comes that you’d like to stop doing it for a living you just let folks know you’re going to blog about whatever you’d like and do it for fun?
I’ve been blogging since February 2001 and still love it.
A Handsome Aluminum and Ultem Smartphone Case
I want one of these. Guess I need to buy an iPhone 14 or 15 Pro? Having an updated iPhone would also open the door to a whole lot of cases I love at Cotton Bureau. 😃
Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, Ben Lovejoy, and Ben Schoon • 9to5Mac
The iPhone is the device that pushed the mobile industry away from physical keyboards, but nothing can truly replace that tactile experience. Launching next month, “Clicks” aims to add a physical keyboard to your iPhone with support for keyboard shortcuts and backlighting too.
In 2013 Ryan Seacrest was part of an effort to bring a physical keyboard to the iPhone. It was called Typo and I never heard much about it beyond the initial announcement. I could’ve sworn it was earlier than 2013, but my memory sometimes fails me.
Anyway, I hope these folks are wildly successful. Good luck y’all!
Richard Devine • Windows Central
The best holiday gift was Mac losing out to Windows, at least according to these stats
It’s obvious some Windows users and pundits still have an inferiority complex when it comes to the Mac. It’s surprising.
I’m an old, long time, Windows developer and I owe a lot to the platform. I spent around 20 years writing code for Windows and I still believe it to be an amazing platform for users and developers. But I switched to the Mac full time in 2006 and have grown to enjoy it every bit as much as Windows.
It’s perfectly fine to love using a different operating system or prefer coding for one over the other. Let people have fun and enjoy what they love doing. ❤️
Here’s hoping 2024 isn’t a complete shit show. 🤣
