Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Another week in the books. It’s my favorite time of the year. Trees are changing color and dropping leaves. Temperatures are beginning to drop. We have Halloween and Thanksgiving coming up. What a wonderful season!🍁🎃🦃
Robert D. McFadden • New York Times
Dianne Feinstein, 90, Dies; Oldest Sitting Senator and Fixture of California Politics
A friend of mine worked for Dianne Feinstein when he was in college. He was a registered Republican but that didn’t matter to her. She still hired him.
RIP 🪦
Moira Warburton and David Morgan • Reuters
WASHINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Hardline Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday rejected a bill proposed by their leader to temporarily fund the government, making it all but certain that federal agencies will partially shut down beginning on Sunday.
And, here we go. All these knuckleheads want to do is tear down democracy. They don’t legislate and pass laws. You’re there to do the work of the people you represent back home.
Anyway, the modern GOP is full of idiots like Gaetz, Boebert, and Green. Why Republicans are so angry and hateful is beyond me. 🤬
Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge
“Did he say we were moving to it specifically or is thinking about it?” Yaccarino asked.
That was Linda Yaccarino’s reply when asked if Twitter was going to start charging a fee for all users, a claim Space Karen made. She was caught off guard, she didn’t know that was the plan. She’s not the CEO of the company. She’s probably there just so Space Karen can say he lived up to his stupid poll.
I’m sure Linda Yaccarino is a more than competent executive but she’s made a deal with the devil. She should be nervous. Especially once he’s fired her. I originally said she be gone in six months. I’m sticking by that. She’s 100 days into her new role and already out of the loop.
Christian Tietze
SwiftUI.View is actually a view model – a model of the view. It’s a blueprint for what to display, but doesn’t contain any actual pixel drawing.
This is an interesting take and I think Christian is right. Once you think about it for a bit it starts to make sense. At least it did for me.
Now, I’ve done a bit of work on one of my apps — Arrgly — that has a few view models and they fit right into the new SwiftUI I’m writing. So, view models work as well, but is it an unneeded level of indirection? Maybe. 🤔
Jenny Gross • The New York Times
A 16-year-old boy was arrested Thursday on suspicion of criminal damage after one of Britain’s most famous trees, a sycamore that stood in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall, was cut down overnight in what the authorities described as “an act of vandalism.”
This is one of those head scratchers. Why in the world would someone just cut a down a random tree?
Hopefully we find out.
Craig Hockenberry
The only explanation I can find for the Timer’s design regressions is an unfamiliarity with some use cases. In the following critique, I’ll focus on how the watch is used in the kitchen and how older customers struggle with the new layout. Suggestions will be kept to a minimum: the effort here is to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Wow! Craig does a deep dive into the Apple Watch Timer. I also used the built in timers when I’d grill.
Umar Shakir • The Verge
Google is offering its employees a new incentive to come into its Mountain View, California office: discounted hotel stays. The company is promoting $99 per night rates for its on-campus hotel to help remote employees transition into a hybrid working schedule, according to a report from CNBC.
Yeah, that’s not what I’d call good marketing. 🤣 you pay us $99 a night so you don’t have to commute to work! Brilliant! How ‘bout you just let folks work from home? 🧠
Gabriela Galindo • WIRED
The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.
If Apple goes after a company over 100 years old because the have a logo with an apple on it they’re pathetic. 🤬
Believe it or not it’s part of what motivated me to change my little company’s name from Apple Core Labs to Hayseed.
Scott Jenson
Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.
I’ve mentioned I compose all my blog posts on my iPhone. I do it largely out of laziness. 😁
I’ve used Tot for a number of years and it has the best editing experience of any iPhone apps I’ve used.
Once I’m happy with my post I copy it to Micro.Blog and post it to my blog. Easy peasy.
Jeff Seldin • Voice of America
White supremacists appear to have settled on a new strategy to grow their numbers and ready capable fighting forces across the United States, Canada and Europe while avoiding the scrutiny of law enforcement.
I’ve been waiting for a war to break out in our country. At the least a bunch of very targeted attacks. If these wannabe soldiers can actually get their act together folks may have to start worrying. If they’re as disorganized and dumbass as they were on January 6, we’ll be fine. Yes, people will die, and that’s a terrible price to pay for stupidity.
Rogers Cadenhead
I publish this blog and seven other sites with Wordzilla, a CMS I wrote for myself and have never released. I began it 20 years ago and the PHP codebase is best examined in small doses because to look upon its full extent would bring a descent into madness worthy of Yog-Shoggoth.
I’ve read Rogers blog for years and years and I had no idea it was a home rolled solution. Good for you, Rogers! I’ve always wanted to create my own publishing system but I don’t have the gumption any longer to do it. 🎩
Ross Dellenger • Yahoo Sports
About 20 minutes after the conclusion of, let’s call it, the Autzen Stadium Massacre — Oregon 42, Colorado 6 — Prime Time himself nicely summed up the sordid affair.
I knew they’d lose eventually. It’s just going to happen, especially with a program in rebuild mode. They’ve already doubled last years win total so I’d say this year has already been a success. I also suspect they’ll win quite a few games this season. More than they lose. 🏈
X Out Hate
We are a group of rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations, artists, activists, and academics. We have diverse ideologies and beliefs, but we have come together to address the danger Elon Musk and X represent to Jews and others.
Space Karen strikes again. He’s a racist and antisemite and has no place running a social media sit with so much power. X has become a home for the worst of the worst and it all his fault.
Hopefully we get some regulation around trust and safety issues that force social media companies to police their platforms better. 🤞🏼
It’s beyond time to leave Twitter. You now have much better choices; Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Very selfishly I’d recommend Mastodon. It’s not controlled by a corporate entity who’s interest is using your data as the product. It’s a rag tag, loosely federated, collection of misfits and absolutely beautiful people carrying on the best conversations. It’s a place to build your community with a site controlled by your community. You don’t answer to anyone but yourself.
Aaron Brooks • MakeUseOf
A critical vulnerability in the WebP Codec has been discovered, forcing major browsers to fast-track security updates. However, widespread use of the same WebP rendering code means countless apps are also affected, until they release security patches.
Yikes! Make sure you patch your browser ASAP.
Evan Low • The Mercury News
Contrary to how some have misrepresented the letter my colleagues and I sent to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, we are not asking to “unilaterally strike (Donald) Trump’s name” from the ballot.
I’d love to see Trumps name stricken from as many states as possible. Especially those where he encouraged election fraud.
As a nation we need to do everything legally possible to keep this dangerous man out of office.
David Jays • The Guardian
A star with incredible presence, Gambon – who has died at the age of 82 – brought heft and delicacy, mischief and feeling, to the stage and screen
Most folks will remember him as Dumbledore. I remember him best for his roles in Sleepy Hollow and Mary Reilly. He played a real nasty piece of work in Mary Reilly and that stuck with me. 🪦
There is this weird part of me that wants to go back to writing cross platform C++. All of my cross platform work was for Windows and Linux. The itch has been there since I moved to iOS code — and I spent [two years in between iOS dev jobs working on a cross platform SDK for Pelco’s video encoding, decoding, and recording devices, all in C++. It never made it to Linux but I spent a whole lotta time working on Pelco’s X SDK. That was our version of a cross platform SDK we used internally to build a cool pipeline framework called MPF, or Media Processing Framework.
I personally don’t care about Apple opening up parts of their OS, like NFC, but I do care about how the App Store works and some of the rules surrounding it. If I were a developer who made his living as an Indie developer I’d want to make as much as I could off of each sell of my apps on the store. As it stands today Apple take a 15-30% cut for each sale of your app or in-app purchases of digital goods. I’d love to see a breakdown of Apple’s expenses related to the App Store vs. income. It has become a big profit center for them so losing any of that revenue would hit their bottom line hard. I’m sure that’s why they’re doing things the way they are in the European Union for compliance with the DMA. Their current plan certainly discourages, and flat out denies small companies, to create their own App Stores.
I may call it a monster in the title but this is a fantastic idea for a device in my opinion. I love that it has both iPad and macOS operating systems and both chipsets. It is after all just an iPad bolted onto a MacBook Pro bottom.
As an aside, being able to create a new RCS app from scratch would allow Apple to make a 100% from the ground up 
I’ve never purchased an Apple iPhone case because they’re just too darned expensive for what you get. I have a couple of custom cases from Syd Cases and a couple Unicorn Beetle cases.
I’ve decided I’m going to work on revamping 
