Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
After Apple announced their price increases for so many of their products I managed to find a new MacBook Air on Amazon at the old price so I went ahead and purchased it.
I got a 15in, M5, 24GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD in Sky Blue. I think it’ll be great for my Sunday morning Coffee and Code adventures.
Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.
I didn’t know Om but by all accounts he was a very kind man. My heart goes out to his family.❤️
R.I.P. Om 🪦
This month marks the Iconfactory’s 30th year pushing pixels and to celebrate we’ve partnered up with our friends at Cotton Bureau to offer a special t-shirt for the occasion. This high-quality, on-demand shirt sports the 30th anniversary logo on the front breast and a large, retro pixel-clicked design on the back.
My friends at The Iconfactory are celebrating 30 years of great design, illustration, and software development with a nifty new t-shirt! My order shipped yesterday and I expect it to arrive soon.
This new design will join my W-W-Dog-Cow, Ollie, and Iconfactory shirts.
With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes.
Follow the link if only to scroll down and look at the beautiful selection of icons Paul chose for the article. All of them are masterworks.
A million-square-foot data center became a lighting rod in this rural county. Local leaders filed lawsuits, proposed laws and organized a ballot measure to challenge it.
I’m surprised when I read about the absolute greed of these companies. California has a water problem. It has for decades and decades and companies want to build water guzzling data centers all over the state.
I have a feeling most of the country doesn’t realize how bad things really are in California. Sure, they had a wet winter but it doesn’t even begin to put a dent in the drought they’re still experiencing.
It’s fire season, yeah, there’s a season for fires in California. So far there hasn’t been a big event this year. Here’s hoping they don’t have one.
Anywho, data centers are going to continue to be a problem in the country unless and until companies start thinking about more than shareholder value and think of the imact to people and the environment. You can cover the planet in data centers but if there’s no water to grow crops it doesn’t do us much good.
I suppose the computers can continue operating as long as we build them bots to service thier needs and they find a way to solve the water problem. Then they won’t need us. 🤔
The team behind Bear just released the beta of Lettera, a native Markdown editor for the Mac. It grew out of Panda, the editor they built for Bear 2, and it’s now evolved into a standalone app.
This app looks really nice and I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl. I don’t know what I’ll use it for since I use Tot for composing my blog posts, but it looks really nice nonetheless.🐻
Lotus Notes, in 1989, had encryption two years before Pretty Good Privacy brought it to normal email, had rich text formatting and attachments before MIME, had read receipts, notifications, a directory of users, and wiki-style cross-message links. It, rightly, felt like the future.
I remember when Notes was a big deal but I never understood the appeal. It makes me wonder if it could have been turned into a web server as well?
It’s also very sad when I think about all the companies that have disappeared from that era; Lotus, WordPerfect, WordStar, Borland, Ashton-Tate, Micrografx, Aldus, Nantucket, Fox Software, Peachtree, and even my beloved Visio. I know there are many, many, others.
Jennifer Ouellette • Ars Technica
Widow’s Bay, the delightfully eccentric new comedic horror series from Apple TV, is easily one of the best new series of the year. There’s a reason everyone from Guillero del Toro and Ben Stiller to Damon Lindelolf (Lost) is raving about the show. It’s an eminently binge-able, addictive series that pays tribute to all the classic horror tropes while reinventing them in surprising ways.
There are so many great television shows to choose from these days it’s extremely difficult for me to start a new one. But, this one does look compelling.
US artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” extracting its Claude AI model’s capabilities.
So, let’s get this straight. You (Anthropic) pulled all you could from websites to train your LLM but you throw a fit when someone else does it to you?
Got it. Fine for Me but not Thee.
I still believe all this LLM stuff should be operated by Universities in conjunction with the federal government. No one company should benefit from it. Why? For one they built it on the backs of all of our hard work. Secondly we don’t need a bunch of hojillionaires running around controlling the LLMs used all over the US and the world.
Look, I don’t know how to make that happen, but it seems a logical choice in hindsight.
Of note: There’s no way I’d trust the management of this technology in the hands of the current, incompetent, administration.
The No. 1 priority for new Apple CEO John Ternus should be revamping the company’s design team and putting the focus back on the look and feel of products.
I think this is already happening. I can’t see them turning on a dime and declaring the whole Liquid Glass thing a complete failure and ditching it but I can see it evolve into something nice before they do a completely new design and throw everything into chaos again.🤣
We can either live with it or move on to another operating system. I can’t see doing that.
The Commodore Callback 8020 is not the first Commodore-branded phone (that would be the Pet from 2015), but it’s the first to feel unique and interesting. It might look like a dumb Nokia phone from yesteryear, but this flippy gadget has access to modern-day Android apps because it runs the Linux-based Sailfish OS from the Finnish company Jolla. The Callback’s front screen shows the date, time and battery status, but no notifications. Flip it open, and you’re greeted with a custom interface that can run apps like Uber, WhatsApp and Spotify.
This is an interesting take on the flip phone. It’s very retro in its styling but it does have an operating system that can run Android apps. It’s meant to be less distracting. I can’t blame folks for wanting that but how many are gonna spend $500 plus on a flip phone just so they can’t install email or social media apps?
AI GPU maker Nvidia just announced a “hotter than a hot tub” liquid cooling system that it says will cut water and electricity use. According to the company, this new solution will run coolant — composed of 75% water and 25% propylene glycol — at 113 degrees F (45 deg C).
The use of propylene glycol seems a logical choice in a closed system but it only accounts for 25% of the overall coolant and, unfortunately, it’s highly toxic.
At least someone is trying something I guess.
Even though he operates out of the rural community of Tulare, Brandon Contreras’ custom-designed shoes have reached across the state and beyond.
This gentleman’s shoes look extremely cool and I’m so happy a kid from the area I grew up found a way to do something he loves and do well for himself.
The Mac I priced up last week for £3,999 now costs £5,199. The one I priced at £6,978 is now £9,699. Didn’t get round to pulling the trigger, fool. 💀
Olly had a post on his blog a week or so back asking if he should buy a new computer. I think the answer should’ve been yes, yes you should’ve upgraded. Sorry Olly.
