Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been a pretty normal week, thankfully. Work has been great. I’ve had the opportunity to have a lot of heads down time on the project which always makes me happy, and my family is good.
Now, go get that nice hot cup of coffee or tea and I hope you enjoy the links!
After much consideration, we have decided to move Platformer off of Substack. Over the next few days, the publication will migrate to a new website powered by the nonprofit, open-source publishing platform Ghost.
It’s good to know Casey took this Nazi stuff very seriously and is removing Platformer from Substack.
Once the dust settles I hope he’s able to pull all of his existing subscribers over and a whole lot more.
Thank you, Casey.
The new Iconfactory has a singular focus. We’ve been leaders in the design industry for decades and the new site puts our attention to detail, our award-winning apps, and our extensive development services at center stage. In short, we want to help you build the best apps you can, and whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, or an indie developer like us, we’re here for you. The new site explains why we’re the ones you should call on, and it does it with plain language and gorgeous examples.
Being a huge fan of The Iconfactory’s work I was excited to see the new site and it certainly delivered. It’s absolutely gorgeous and really does put what they do front and center. I hope it pays huge dividends for them!
I also noticed they featured the artwork they did for Stream’s feature in the App Store! I’m honored! ❤️
RIP? Third-party podcast app Castro appears to be dead, company goes quiet
So this outage was worse than the last one. It took down not only the service but the website as well. I really thought they’d disappeared but a couple days later they were back.
It still surprises me companies with services like this don’t have a fallback position that would allow them to spin up an environment on a different provider and point the app to it instead, without rebuilding the app of course. I dunno, maybe that’s weird or overthinking the problem, but it makes sense to me.
Better yet, Castro would be better served by eliminating the need for their own service and use existing podcast directories combined with iCloud to sync user settings and subscription lists. That would also offload checking for updated podcast episodes to the client side, but that’s not a big deal.
Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone if we use a reasonable definition of “few”.
More layoffs. Hopefully this doesn’t ripple out to smaller companies like WillowTree. Last May, for the first time in company history, we had a layoff. It’s felt strange being there ever since and I feel terribly guilty and extremely grateful I survived it. I really don’t want to see another one.
Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, Michael Potuck, and Arin Waichulis • 9to5Mac
iPhone from onboard Alaska Airlines incident found; survives 16,000-foot drop
Now that’s a real drop test! It amazes me I have broken two iPhones by dropping both while getting out of a car and having them fall out of my pocket. That’s like two feet off the ground.
It would’ve been cooler to find it shattered on a sidewalk or parking lot. 😂
It looks like X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has a Verified bot problem. Although X owner Elon Musk suggested that forcing users to pay for verification would help to weed out the bots (aka automated accounts) on the platform, that does not appear to be the case.
I really need to do another Space Karen post, A.K.A. The Musk Files. This dude has really screwed the pooch but it’s all his to do whatever he wants with it.
If you’re smart you’ll backup your tweets, delete them all, and abandon the platform. There are other great choices today like Mastodon or Threads. Your best bet is Mastodon + a blog so you can get free of the whims of corporations and their silos.
Lisa Boone • Los Angeles Times
Curious about building an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, in your backyard? Whether for extra income or much-needed housing for family, perhaps it’s time to investigate one of the hottest housing options in California.
An ADU is an Accessory Dwelling Unit.
It’s a label used to describe an additional place folks can live on the same property. Those garage or shed conversions you hear about can be considered ADU’s.
We had a really great detached garage at our home in California we converted into a really great living space. Our daughter and her family lived there for about a year so they could save money. We intended to use it as a She Shed for Kim but we moved to Virginia and never realized her dream.
Let’s say you’re writing a long running multi-threaded application, on Linux. Maybe it’s a database or a server of some sort. Let’s also imagine that you’re not running on some managed runtime (maybe the JVM, Go, or BEAM), but rather managing threads spawned using the clone syscall. Think of threads created in C with pthread_create, or using C++’s std::thread.
I was part of a team who wrote our own internal C++ framework — it was dubbed XSDK — for all of our teams. We had really wonderful thread support but I can’t remember how we handled interrupting them to stop them. I believe we had a Stop() method that would set a flag the threads Run() method was responsible for checking and clean itself up. After setting the flag the Stop() method would join the thread and wait for it to terminate. Anyway, our implementation used pthreads for Linux and native Windows API thread support for Windows. They both worked really well.
Explosive new audio of Roger Stone reveals the longtime Trump ally was trying to plot the assassinations of two outspoken Democratic congressmen.
I’m sorry I’m so obsessed with the orange man and the folks in his orbit. They’re all deranged bullies and must be defeated again.
VinFast Will Try And Sell Its Tiny VF3 SUV In The U.S. With 125-Mile Range For Under $20,000
I believe we need more EVs like this. Limited range and less expensive. This price is something I’m willing to pay for a new vehicle.
While I still believe we need to fund better public transportation over cars at a federal, state, and local level, the idea of an inexpensive, limited range, EV is a good start.
Isaac Arnsdorf • The Washington Post
Speaking to reporters after an appeals court hearing in which Trump’s lawyers said he should be immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, Trump claimed without evidence that he was being prosecuted because of polls showing him leading President Biden. He warned that if the charges succeed in damaging his candidacy, the result would be “bedlam.”
Our courts need to start coming down on this asshole. He’s such an authoritarian he uses his outsized influence to foment violence from his supporters.
If our court system treats him differently because he may cause violence we’ve lost our nation.
You combat a bully by punching him in the nose, hard. Let him cool his jets in prison for a while and see how it suits him.
At a minimum he should be suspended from running for President given a Colorado court rules he engaged in insurrection.
I really hope the Supreme Court interpret Section 3 or the 14 Amendment to include the President. 🤞🏼
Goose stepping moron pictured above
Videogame software provider Unity Software (U.N) will target laying off approximately 25% of its workforce, or 1,800 jobs, the company said in a regulatory filing and internal company memo on Monday.
Ahhh, Unity is back in the news. I wonder if this had anything to do with the decisions made in September of last year or it’s just “market forces”, whatever that means, that caused the need to let go of so many people.
It never occurred to me that these facts could somehow be perverted by partisanship. But three years later, we are seeing just that, as Republicans cling to the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and are poised to make Trump their 2024 nominee. And perhaps even more dangerous than the GOP ditching reality is the news media’s inability to cover Trumpism as the threat to democracy that it very much is.
The march to an authoritarian America continues, unabated. I need to step up and do what I can to stop the orange menace from winning and destroying the country as we know it.
The image above really captures what people like about a Trump Presidency. They think he’s going to make their lives wonderful by casting out all the people they hate; black and brown, Jewish or Muslim. What they don’t understand is he’s going to screw them over along with everyone else.
