Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Yeah, I finally managed to get Stream for Mac out the door! WOO-HOO!
I think it’s been downloaded at least 10 times. 🤣
Anyway, that was my excitement for the week! Work has been fine, the family is doing well, and I’m just plugging along. Today we need to do some stuff around here and continue emptying our storage and moving it to our shed here at the house. Yeah, another tiring weekend, but we’re SOOOO close to being done now. Wish us luck! 🍀
Charlotte Rene Woods • Virginia Mercury
On Election Day, Virginians approved three amendments to enshrine reproductive, marriage and voting rights for former felons into the state’s constitution, the culmination of a multi-year journey through the state legislature galvanized by lawmakers, advocates and major federal shifts.
I wasn’t very tuned in to the three initiatives on the ballot this piece is talking about, but I kept seeing signs all over our area that read “No on All Three.” It turns out I didn’t agree with that notion at all. Voting YES on all three was the proper response.
I’m glad my fellow Virginian’s felt the same. ❤️
I had a blast brainstorming concepts for Strategery, focusing on the bright, fun aspects of the game. It was a joy to use vibrant colors, dynamic angles and motifs that fans of strategy games would gravitate towards in my sketches. In the end, Lex picked my personal favorite idea to go with as the final icon and I’m very proud of the result. It’s always an honor to get to contribute to the fabric of the App Store, in all its forms, but especially in support customers who realize the importance of human-created art and design like Lex. I hope I get to continue doing it for a long time to come.
Ged is a co-founder, designer, and all around great human at The Iconfactory! Yes, more Iconfactory love from Rob! They’re without a doubt my favorite design shop and build some of the Mac and iOS Apps I use everyday.
Anywho, it’s good to see Ged talk about the work he does there on a daily basis and see the joy he feels doing it. His work is, of course, beautiful.
I say go hire them and give them more joy than they know what to do with! 😂
They’ve done incredible work over the years for clients large and small. Everything from icons for Microsoft Windows to the icon for my little app. Yes, they can help out large corporations with design and illustration work!
I recently took on a project to implement a language model on an FPGA. In simple terms, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an IC that can be reconfigured to implement hardware circuit designs written in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) such as SystemVerilog. They are particularly interesting because you don’t run software on them the way you would using microcontrollers. Instead, you reconfigure the chip into a hardware design. This gives you things that you couldn’t get in software such as true parallelism in combinational logic circuits.
What is the best thing about working at WillowTree? The people. It’s 100% the people. I get to work with folks who are so smart and kind ever day of the week. It’s been the one constant since I arrived here in 2019.
Nish Tahir is one of those brilliant, lovely, people. The man is so smart I could never expect to keep up with half the stuff he’s working on and talking about, but he’s also incredibly kind and approachable. If I wanted to better understand what he’s working on in his blog post I’m certain he’d sit down with me an explain it in a way even I could understand. 😁
I’m quite often shocked by the raw talent we have at WillowTree. There are so many folks who could venture off into one of the big companies like Apple, Microsoft, or Google and do really well there, and on occasion, someone does. ❤️
Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication.
It’s difficult to find the right words for the end of something that has meant so much to so many people. Salon was never just a website. It was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier.
I remember a time when I read Salon quite a bit. Is it me or did they run Salon on Frontier or Radio Userland at one time? Doesn’t matter. It’s sad to see a company who did a bunch of great work over the years fold. 😔
I’ve written at length about my search for the perfect digital music app. I’ve spent too much time, trialling every app and streaming service I find, and wasting hours trying to coax Qobuz into being ‘the one’ with CSS (only to find they use Tailwind, and lack enough semantic hooks). It’s more of a sad indictment of my obsessive brain, than the quality of app choices out there though. I can’t just pick one and get on with my life it seems.
Except now, there’s a new app called ‘Jacket’, named after the thing the record sleeve goes into, that fulfills all but two of my niche criteria. It offers much more, and it’s the closest any app has come.
Jon is an another one of those amazing designers I have a great deal of respect for. Now he’s gone and done it! He’s building a Music app and it’s REALLY good! I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now and he’s done an incredible job on it. Go check it out, it may be the type of music app you’ve been looking for.
Kunal Khullar • Tom’s Hardware
As high-end PC hardware continues to surge in demand and price, GPU theft has become a highly profitable target for criminals. According to a report by ABC7 News, authorities are investigating a major cargo heist involving the disappearance of an $11.4 million shipment of Nvidia hardware. The shipment reportedly consisted of six pallets of Nvidia hardware that left Oakland for Texas on August 29 and was picked up by a truck posing as a food transport company. Investigators eventually lost track of the vehicle in San Bernardino County, with the Oakland Police Department receiving a report of the theft on September 13.
With all the Jensen Huang stuff going on these thefts leave me wondering if there’s any connection with the spy who loved him?
I’m pretty sure this story line has already been made into a movie, probably starring Tom Cruise as the hero. 😁
If they did make a movie who would play Jensen Huang? 🤔
Beyond these initial fixes, Microsoft has even bigger plans to improve Windows 11 quality this year, by focusing on performance, reliability, and “well-crafted experiences.” Davuluri’s fix list, which you can read in full below, focuses on core stuff like how fast Windows 11 starts and responds, how stable it is, and how consistent it is to use.
I still have great respect for Microsoft and Windows. When I made my living on Windows based computers I hated the Windows vs. macOS comparisons and who was better. Windows is a really great OS that has managed to be ported to multiple platforms, runs on all different kinds of hardware, and is still very reliable.
But, and there’s always a but, Microsoft has made moves in recent years that have driven even Windows loyalists crazy. The operating system now requires a Microsoft account of some kind and even displays ads in the OS? That’s really disgusting.
The Microsoft account thing is really no different than what we have with Apple IDs, so that’s not such a big thing to me, but a lot of Windows users are used to having freedom to do what they want with their PCs and the idea that you have to log into a Microsoft service sounds counter to that culture.
Anyway, I wish I had the chops to go work on Windows, I’d love to do it, especially if I could be part of a team making those performance and UI enhancements. I really do want to see Microsoft settle on a UI and SDK strategy used across the board on all their tooling inside and out. At one point it was easy to choose. You had C and C++ plus the Windows API (Win32), and that was it. You built apps that looked and felt at home on the platform. Sure, you could build a great app with Delphi or Visual Basic but most were written in C/C++.
I suspect today most apps are being built with Electron or some derivative thereof.
It would be really nice, in my opinion, if they packaged Rust into Visual Studio and targeted WinUI 3 as their primary method of building modern Windows applications.
It looks like they do recommend WinUI 3 for building modern Windows Apps, that’s good. The question is, who’s using it? Anyone know? 🤔
While updating Kotoba from a hospital bed, I encountered a problem while presenting a UIKit view from SwitfUI on the iPhone Duo – it totally stumped me. It’s one of those things that make sense once you discover the solution, but is unintuitive until then.
Craig in a longtime Mac and iOS Developer and is so kind to share his knowledge and findings with the wider community.
His blog is one you should follow in Stream, you are using Stream, right? 😂
Discord is finally giving up on Electron, the cross-platform framework that lets developers build desktop apps using web technologies. Electron web apps are notoriously heavy on system resources, and Discord is now moving its desktop app fully to Rust — a modern programming language designed for speed and memory safety.
I’m really excited to see how the portable Rust works out for the Discord folks. This is a project I’d love to work on if I were a Rust expert. It’s a great chance to sink your technical teeth into a cross platform app used by millions. Big scale, big expectations.
I wonder what they’re doing at the UI level? I would encourage them to use native UI for each platform and embrace each platform as if it were the only UI they were writing. So, for Windows, make a GREAT Windows client, same for Mac and Linux. Nail each in a way that makes platform users excited to point to your app as a model for other apps on their platform.
I kind of doubt that’ll happen in the name of consistency across platforms, but it sure would be nice! ❤️
The iPhone Duo is an incredible device. I ended up getting mine a few days after the launch and I wanted to use it for a week before writing anything just to make sure I wasn’t the one who was crazy. I honestly think I’ve liked using it more each day.
More love for the iPhone Duo. I need to spend a little time tweaking Stream to be better on the Duo. It’s ok now. It looks fine but it could be better with some minor changes. I need to get to those minor changes as soon as I can.
I’m happy to see folks really like their Duo’s by and large. It’s another interesting form factor to play with! 👍🏼
On October 23, 2026, the unthinkable happened. It was supposed to be a mere formality: C++26 was up for a vote by the ISO National Bodies (NBs). The options are always approval, rejection, or abstention. Comments are also allowed. Since 1998, this process had run quietly and smoothly. Not so on October 23, 2026. After a twelve-week voting period, the result is in: Disapproved!
Things like this are bound to happen in standards bodies, right? You have a group of highly skilled, uber intelligent, and opinionated folks working on something. They’re going to bring in their biases, even though they’re open minded, and you’ll have something fail a final vote.
It’s all good. C++ has evolved SO much since I last used it day-to-day and I suspect a lot of “old” C++ is still being written today. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’d imagine a lot of shops are adopting modern C++ as they work in different areas of their code bases.
Remember, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you have a hunk of code that’s worked for 10-years and it’s written using chars and arrays don’t go replacing it with std::string and std::vector “just because.” Just leave it alone and work on new stuff.
Elon Musk’s AI company xAI is reportedly looking to buy as many as 418 homes in a Mississippi neighbourhood near its data centres. However, the offers come with a condition: homeowners must agree not to join a lawsuit against the company over noise from its nearby power plant. According to a report by The Guardian, real estate agents have been visiting residents in Colonial Hills, a neighbourhood in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of xAI.
Garbage human. Con artist. Hello, Space Karen. Get stuffed.
But are all of Gilliam’s genre films great? Or, more to the point, is Time Bandits, released in the US on November 6, 1981, actually a full-on classic? 45 years after this film was in theaters for the first time, it’s tough to consider Time Bandits on par with some of his greatest work. That said, this is also one of the first movies that he did that signaled the beginning of where his career would eventually go. In other words, Time Bandits might not be a work of pure Gilliam genius, but it predicts the genius that is to come.
I remember seeing this on VHS back in the days before we owned a VHS, back when you’d rent a VHS for a weekend along with a few tapes and bring it back a couple days later.
Anywho, I loved this film and I’ve seen it a number of times. Every once in a while I’ll see mention of Brazil somewhere and Time Bandits always comes to mind.
If you get a chance to see it, see it. It’s a relly fun movie. And remember, do not touch concentrated evil. Things won’t end well.
They’re just flat memory regions! So these malloc() and mfree() work on explicit memory regions! Not only that, mfree() receives the size of the object it is deallocating, as it should. Those are just infinitely-times better interfaces than traditional malloc()/free().
I love this! Digital spelunking! Go see how the original authors of the C programming language allocated and used memory. It was smart, but I’d imagine, most computer science educated folks would look at the code and tell the authors how stupid their design was. 😂
One of the beautiful things about earlier computing was how simple things were. In modern languages and tooling it takes so much code and effort just to display “Hello world!”
I do miss my earlier programming adventures at times but I also very much enjoy working in modern languages and frameworks. I do love Swift and Apple platforms.
Newton Gitonga • Tom’s Hardware
OpenAI considers rebranding data centers to ‘AI compute campuses" as data center backlash intensifies — company reportedly sees 2028 presidential election becoming an ‘AI issue’
Typical. Instead of tackling difficult problems that would make your terrible data centers better citizens just rename them. That’ll fix everything.
COME ON PEOPLE! FIX THE PROBLEMS! I know it’s difficult. Do the work, stop taking short cuts!
Developers who use AI effectively are approaching it very differently. They understand the problem they’re solving. They understand the requirements, the trade-offs, and how the different components of a system interact. AI isn’t replacing that knowledge.. it’s amplifying it.
I very much agree with Darren. If you’re already a developer and have years and years of experience you can use LLMs to great effect. I’ve always been a very slow coder, I get there, but it takes me a while. I often start off experimenting, throwing code away, and iterating until I like something. With an LLM I could just let it go on my idea and it’s going to do it in minutes instead of hours or days. That’s the advantage and the code I’ve seen produced has been perfectly fine and understandable. I’m sure folks have seen sloppy stuff, it’s bound to happen, they’re trained on the work we humans produced.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Christmas movie “Jingle All the Way” became a box office hit in 1996, and 30 years later he’s back with another festive action comedy in “The Man with the Bag.” This time, he’s brought “Reacher” star Alan Ritchson along for the ride, and we just got our first full look at the holiday heist comedy via its first full-length trailer.
We always watch Jingle All the Way at Christmas time and I’m looking forward to seeing Arnold as Santa. 🎅🏼
