Shhhh, don’t tell Kim’s roses it’s supposed to be fall. 🌹

Saturday Morning Coffee

Time to sip some coffee and write. It’s that quiet time of the morning I love. Let’s get to it.

This week has been a split in my various timelines; Mastodon, Twitter, and RSS Feeds between the war in Ukraine, Elon Musk bungling management of Twitter, and the mid term elections in the United States. It’s been quite a week.

The Guardian

“In extraordinary scenes, crowds of jubilant residents greeted Ukraine’s armed forces as they reached the centre of Kherson, as Russia’s retreat from the key strategic city appeared to have descended into chaos.”

Let’s go Ukraine! 🇺🇦

Vox

“Democrats outperformed history and expectations with a surprisingly strong midterm elections performance Tuesday, with the promised red wave nowhere to be found.”

This is a real relief. Democrats may lose the house but it looks like the Senate may remain in control of the Democrats and leaves me hopeful we can still save Democracy.

One more term for Biden should keep TFG away from running again.

Platformer

”Everything went from bad to worse at Twitter on Thursday. Today let’s talk about a truly chaotic 24 hours at the company, and the mounting fears over what it means for the service that still serves as the heartbeat of the global news cycle.”

There are so many wonderful hot takes I could post so I’ll probably do another Elon/Twitter hot takes post.

What a complete mess. Either Twitter will go down in a great ball of flames or it will be the most masterful recovery in tech industry history.

Anna Nicholson

“In a complete departure from my usual meanderings, I’m going to present an in-depth comparative review of eight iOS Mastodon/Fediverse apps.”

So, right, Mastodon. The growth on Mastodon has been huge since Musk took over Twitter.

I’m following folks like crazy! I’m up to 465 and I now have 307 folks following me. That is absolutely insane and I never thought I’d see if happen. It’s been so refreshing. The mood on Mastodon has been extremely hopeful and folks are getting along rather well. It’s fun to be there!

If you decide to join take your time finding an instance that’s right for you. There are so many to choose from.

If you’re adventurous consider starting your own! There are hosts out there who make it easy to maintain your instance. Just pay them a few bucks a month.

Alex Suzuki

“My mind is not a sponge anymore. I still love learning, but it does not come as easily as it used to. Take programming languages, for instance. I’ve come to accept that after almost two decades of writing code, I am not really an expert in any single one.”

I have never been as bright as Mr. Suzuki but I worked really hard at my craft and got decent at Windows programming in C and C++. I’ve worked in other environments like C#/.Net, Linux, and finally landing at home on iOS with Objective-C and Swift.

I’m still capable of learning new stuff but I’ve always been extremely slow to do it. I eventually get there it just takes time.

I relate so much to ”my brain is no longer a sponge.” Mine is not. I used to keep a lot of stuff in my head as I was coding. It was easy for me to keep code flow and logic all stuffed in my brain as I was adding new features. Not anymore. It hasn’t been that way for a very long time. Now I have to refresh my findings often and when I step away from code I’ve written it can take a while to get back in the swing of things. Why do you think Stream development takes so long? 😁

I can still do the work it’s just not as easy, or quick, as before.

Becoming an Engineering Director has been really good for me. I get to build up wonderful people and client relationships. I still get to solve technical problems and make recommendations but I no longer have to code them. It’s been a wonderful challenge in ways I never imagined.

Rolling Stone

“Donald Trump ended his pre-midterm rally blitz in disgusting fashion, calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “an animal,” championing the death penalty, and giddily imagining the prison rape of the journalist who reported on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn [Roe v. Wade.”

This guy cannot get near any government office ever again. He’ll destroy democracy.

Horror Hound

“One such monster maker is Mexican director, producer and author Guillermo Del Toro.”

This piece is about Cabinet of Curiosities. Kim and I just completed it. I really enjoyed it, each episode was around an hour in length, and ended without the possibility of each episode having a part two. It was refreshing and I hope we get another season of new stories. Yes, think Twilight Zone, or Stephen King’s Creep Show.

My favorite episodes were:

Episode 1: Lot 36 Episode 3: The Autopsy Episode 5: Pickman’s Model Episode 6: Dreams in the Witch House Episode 8: The Murmuring

Don’t get me wrong, they’re all good, but those stand out in my mind. Pickman’s Model and Dreams in the Witch House really stood out.

Check it out.

Facebook

“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”

Who’d of thunk Mark Zuckerberg would handle massive layoffs so well. Yeah, it terrible to see 11,000 folks out of work but at least he didn’t do it by sending them an email signed by Twitter. He put his name to everything.

Scripting News

“But as a writer, I can’t use a system that doesn’t do inbound RSS. It’s the inverse of the silo problem.”

At first I didn’t understand what Dave was after. I thought he wanted RSS to be used to thread a conversation like Twitter.

Dave just wants to populate his Twitter, Mastodon, and other social sites with an RSS feed. That’s a nifty idea especially if he could work with some of the smaller players to agree to a standard way to connect it. Basically the sites need a way to point to the feed, read the feed, parse, and display it. Done and done.

I like it.

The Grug Brained Developer

“big brain type system shaman often say type correctness main point type system, but grug note some big brain type system shaman not often ship code. grug suppose code never shipped is correct, in some sense, but not really what grug mean when say correct”

I love the Grug, whatever that is. If you’re a developer and need some levity this is the place to go.

Ya think?

Tiny Apple Core

Sister and Brother enjoying the sun.

On the left is Priss and on the right is Flynn. She was named after Priss in the movie Blade Runner and he was named after Flynn Rider from the movie Tangled.

I say Flynn was named after Kevin Flynn from Tron, but it was really Flynn Rider because he has a little soul patch on his chin.

Happy scarecrow!

Mastodon for News Organizations

It’s a prime time for news organizations to spin up their own Twitter like service.

A wonderful bouquet of flowers.Look, I believe [Mastodon] (https://joinmastodon.org/) is the beginning of something that could be very special. It uses the internet as it was intended to connect multiple Twitter like services together and anyone can have one. Think of how email works at a very high level. I have a GMail account and you have one at your company, say The Atlantic. If I know your email address I can send you email and our email servers know how to talk to each other. Brilliant! That’s a 30,000ft view of Mastodon.

Ms. Applebaum is asking which instance, or server, to join. Yeah, that’s a tough one. Some of the most popular servers, those with the Mastodon name, are jam packed with users and until Mastodon is great at scaling horizontally it’s going to be slow when you host a lot of people.

By contrast I have a teeny-tiny instance for me and my friends. It only has seven users but it slides right into the Mastodon ecosystem so anyone with an account on any Mastodon server can follow me and we can have a very Twitter like conversation. It’s really quite wonderful. I’m able to do this for $6/month. That’s it.

Of course a server hosting thousands or tens of thousands of users would cost a whole lot more.

Red sock.What if instead of piling on at one of the generic Mastodon instances writers formed a collective and spun up their own server? What if the companies they work for did it instead? In the Anne Apllebaum case The Atlantic could have a subdomain of The Atlantic running a Mastodon server. It could be something like stream.theatlantic.com. Boom! All writers for The Atlantic would have a home from which to write and the server wouldn’t be overwhelmed with users causing slowdowns.

Dan Hon

A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More

Another service worth considering is Micro.blog. It is it’s own service, not based on Mastodon, but it supports two way communication with Mastodon servers!

Micro.blog has a Twitter like timeline of folks and for posts over 256 characters it allows you to make a blog post that is linked directly into its timeline. If you have any followers on a Mastodon server your “tweets” can be seen by people on that servers as well and you can see their replies. Micro.blog also supports custom domain names. It’s how I publish this very blog at rob.crabapples.net.

Micro.blog has really great service and help to get your rolling.

Another thing brewing from one of the creators of RSS, Dave Winer, is a way to federate using RSS. I don’t have a handle on this idea, at all, but if there was a way to do two way communication with RSS so we could carry on a threaded conversation, I’d be extremely interested given I’m the creator a feed reader.

There are so many things in a state of flux at the moment it’s really difficult to see where they’ll land but it’s another exciting time in the evolution of the web and I’m here for it!

Saturday Morning Coffee

I struggled to get started this morning. Not because I didn’t want to write. There’s just so much going on at Twitter I could fill today’s post with all Twitter news stories. That could still happen. I haven’t decided yet.

Get that cup ready and strap in. To quote the legendary Forrest Gump. ☕️

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Martin Fowler Spicy Mexican Coffee

“In the United States, we have midterm elections coming up. Many people aren’t interested in politics, or feel there is nobody worthwhile to vote for. If you’re an American inclined to skip voting in these mid-terms, I’d appreciate it if you read this appeal.”

It seems that every election from now until we can rid the country of Trumpism will be the vote of our lives.

I have no doubt there are folks I interact with every day worried about the future of our great nation. Im terrified and fully expect a Civil War to erupt. That will happen if Republicans take over the House, Senate, and Presidency lead by TFG.

I predict if he returns the eight year Presidental term as defined will be overturned. TFG will become our dictator and the greatest Democracy every know will fade into the dark of a new dystopian America.

Los Angeles Times

“Chilling new details continue to emerge about last week’s attack on House Speaker Nancy’s Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, at their San Francisco home as the suspect faces formal charges on Monday.”

We absolutely need to call this what it was: an assassination attempt.

TFG and his MAGA, Q loving, base are out of control and have to be stopped.

Tech Crunch

“On Thursday evening, all employees received an email stating that they will be informed of their employment status at 9 A.M. PT on Friday. Each email will be sent with the subject line “Your Role at Twitter.” If an employee is keeping their job, they’ll be notified via their work email — if they’re let go, they’ll be notified on a personal address.”

The Washington Post

“As Twitter advertisers run for the exits, the world’s richest man has apparently decided to set his $44 billion investment on fire”

Musk is a strange bird and was forced to buy Twitter even after he realized he’d made a terrible mistake. Twitter lawyers wrote a bullet proof deal after Musk declared he didn’t care to have any due diligence on the deal.

Major blunder. Now he’s playing games with peoples lives. Laying off up to half of the Twitter staff.

The teams around making Twitter less of a hellscape are gone. I have one good programmer friend, who joined the company in May of this year, who was let go. He was barely getting started and had already contributed a great deal to improving internal iOS dev process and tools. He’ll be fine and I’m trying to get him to come back to WillowTree, wish me luck. 🤞🏼

Stripe

“Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date. We’re reducing the size of our team by around 14% and saying goodbye to many talented Stripes in the process.”

While it’s not fun to go through a layoff compare and contrast how Stipe handled it vs. Twitter’s ham fisted version. It’s night and day different.

Stripe is taking care of those effected. Go read the piece. This is a very compassionate, empathetic, way to do something so devastating.

Jalopnik

“Four years ago, Dodge showed up at SEMA with a thousand-horsepower crate engine that you could just buy off the shelf.”

Raw unadulterated power. Don’t get me wrong. I want to save the planet and get rid of all carbon emitting gas guzzlers, but this engine gets my heart pumping.

Daring Fireball

“The gambling/casino-related ads were so dominating the auctions for these new ad slots that they were even being presented at the bottom of the product pages for apps intended to help people with gambling addiction.”

Apple becoming a home for advertising feels so, so, dirty. They make all this stink about privacy and go about destroying Facebook (whom I could care less about) by using the power of their platform to disallow the tracking necessary for them to survive. Then they say “Hey! Look over here! We do safe ads with a captive audience on a platform with 50% market share in the US.”

Steve is rolling in his grave and Tim Apple is running his hands together like Mr. Burns with a giant smile on his face because shareholder value.

Just stop.

The Exeter Sun

“VISALIA – Quesadilla lovers across the country should be excited as Quesadilla Gorilla begins their journey of spreading peace love and dillas throughout the states one store at a time.”

I had to add this story this morning because I love this little speciality dining experience. It’s simple, it’s just quesadilla’s, but they’re really good.

If you ever have one make sure you get the Liquid Gold sauce for dipping. It’s absolutely delicious. 😃

Tiny Apple Core

Lucky and Flynn

This is Lucky and Flynn. Half brothers from litters six months apart. Their momma was a stray we took care of and tried time and again to catch her so we could have here spayed. Her name was Binx. We eventually developed some trust with her, she’d rub against my leg in the morning when I fed her and her sister and we finally caught her. Great little momma kitty.

It’s that time of the year. Starbucks Red Cups are back!

Who’s going to complain about them this year?

Twitter smells like Musk

Robert Reich

“If Musk’s tweet doesn’t raise bright red warning signs all over the world about his judgment and character, just days after he took over one of the planet’s largest and most influential media machines, I don’t know what will.”

Musk is already stinking up the place with conspiracy theories, also know as misinformation, also know best as a lie.

Mastodon Growing Pains

A wonderful bouquet of flowers.Be patient as you create your new Mastodon account. There are many different servers to choose from. If you have the means and feel adventurous start an instance all your own with some friends! I have one and I host it for $6US/month at Masto.host. They have amazing service, my site is always up, and upgraded to the latest versions of Mastodon so I don’t have to worry about a thing. They also scale up so you can have a small group, like I do, or you can have thousands of users.

Big or small it all works together to form a single community with different interests and viewpoints. It’s like the internet was intended to work! A bunch of different sites all talking to each other to form a collective. There is no central authority, like you have with Twitter.

Kolby is not happy Mom is leaving him home while she goes to the store.

Saturday Morning Coffee

I’m on my second cup. The first one disappeared while putting together this post.

Kolby, our puppers, decided he wanted to get up at 7AM. He doesn’t understand the concept of weekends. That’s ok, I still love him.

Platformer: “Elon Musk took over Twitter on Thursday like a military general who had assumed power by force, purging the company’s ruling regime and replacing it with the singular effect of his personality.”

The Verge: “Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.”

The Elon era has begun. Will it be a total disaster or will he turn it around? One thing is for sure, the platform is poised to become more extreme and folks are fleeing. I plan on sticking around because I’m addicted but I also have my Mastodon instance and enjoy it. Read on for a link to a getting started with Mastodon post.

Per Axbom: “Let’s face it, Mastodon can be as confusing as it is rewarding. Especially if you are used to something else (like Twitter). The trick is always to minimise the frustrations and get on with the social benefits. And breathe. And find amusement in the chaos. Here are some tips to help y0u on your way.”

Here we are, a nice piece on getting started with Mastodon. I really do enjoy it. It’s a federation of little Twitters minus the advertising and each instance has the ability to define their own rules and controls which other instances it will allow pairing with. Basically if you have a garbage instance like Gab you can block them from participating with your network. There are a few out there, but most are excellent and provide great diversity in the community.

Apple Security Engineering: “To inaugurate our security research blog, we present the first in a series of technical posts that delves into important memory safety upgrades in XNU, the kernel at the core of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.”

If you’ve ever written any C or C++ code you know the power of the language as well as the pitfalls. This is a really nice post on Apple’s pursuit to harden the XNU kernel at the heart of their products. Great read.

Reuters: “Oct 26 (Reuters) - Skechers USA Inc (SKX.N) said on Wednesday its executives escorted Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, out of a Los Angeles corporate office, after the rapper and fashion designer ‘showed up unannounced and uninvited’.”

Our society has two sets of rules; one for the rich and one for the rest of us. Kanye definitely exercises his privilege every chance he gets.

The man is an antisemite and should be shunned by society. His behavior of late is stirring an already vile nest of hornets into a frenzy.

We cannot tolerate that behavior.

Ed Zitron: “As I’ve written before, I do not think much of Mark Zuckerberg as a CEO.”

I’m no fan of Facebook and I don’t feel bad for the folks who continue to serve this company. You know what you’re doing. If you have anything resembling a soul remaining, get out now.

The Daily Beast: “Guillermo del Toro effusively loves all things ghoulish, grotesque, and squishy—not to mention that he has a particular fondness for dank subterranean locales and slimy tentacled beasts.”

I’ve been looking forward to the release of Cabinet of Curiosities for some time now. We haven’t started watching but we most certainly will be, soon I hope.

WillowTree: “VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Oct. 27, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – Today, TELUS Corporation (T-TSX; NYSE-TU) and TELUS International (NYSE and TSX: TIXT), a leading digital customer experience innovator that designs, builds and delivers next-generation solutions, including AI and content moderation, for global and disruptive brands, are pleased to announce a definitive agreement to acquire WillowTree”

Let’s go!

Tiny Apple Core

Kim’s latest October flag.

A wee bit wicked.

Flynn is crashed.

Too bad I need to wake him up. Dad needs more coffee! ☕️

Saturday Morning Coffee

This morning I started putting together the notes from this week prior to writing the intro. I had so much content there’s no way I could share it all.

We have Ukraine, the continued effort by the GOP to destroy our nation, and the continued domination of the news by Elon Musk.

I got my COVID bivalent vaccine earlier in the week. I felt crummy the day after but have been fine since.

Next week I’ll be onsite at WillowTree meeting with my all remote group. Wish me luck. Last time we had this event I got COVID. I told my boss if that happened again I was never attending another one. He was OK with that. 😄

Enjoy your coffee and the links. ☕️

Wired: “A CUP OF coffee in the morning is not just about the caffeine (though that’s certainly important). It’s the ritual that starts the day. There’s the sound of beans grinding, the toasted smell of brewing coffee—even waiting for your brew to finish is a part of the fun. It’s a way to let yourself know that it’s time to start creeping toward wakefulness, like the sun peeking over the horizon in an old-timey Folgers commercial—all fuzzy and warm and full of promise.”

The first link had to be about coffee, right? I had to do it first! Charlottesville own Grit is mentioned. It’s my favorite local shop.

Meson Stars: “A toaster-sized instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover is ‘reliably’ converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars at about the same rate as a small tree on Earth, a new study has revealed.”

YAY SCIENCE! 🥳

I will warn you, this whole terraforming idea can go really sideways.

Six Colors: “I get it. The iPad Pro isn’t ready for a complete hardware redesign, nor did Apple want to redesign the Magic Keyboard this year. But the result is that the leading iPad is missing innovations that the cheap iPad offers. It’s weird.”

I didn’t pay attention to the Apple announcement this week, but I can see how this would be extremely confusing.

What do you mean the low end model is better than the Pro model?

Puck.news: “Where we last left the Twitter saga, our reluctant hero Elon Musk had essentially made the difficult decision that he’d be better off forking over another $20 billion of his own cash rather than continue to fight Twitter in court and still end up paying a fine in the billions of dollars—perhaps double-digit billions—and have only a bunch of lawsuits to show for it.”

This guy. I’ll say it again, for being such a genius this was a dumb move.

Then again, he may make fools of us all. We can only hope. 🤔

Engadget: “On one hand, Musk has told prospective investors that he plans to axe 75 percent of the Twitter’s 7,500-member staff upon completion of the deal, a move that would likely cripple the site’s operations and kneecap its ability to moderate content and ensure users' security.”

Yeah! Let’s buy a company for $54.20 a share — it’s not worth nearly that much — and promptly run it in the ground.

Where is everybody going next? I’m still recommending Mastodon or Micro.blog.

Chris Coyier: “If you publish stuff on the web, you’re outputting HTML at URLs for people to read. And it’s good form to provide an RSS feed as well maybe JSON if you’re hip. That’s 2-3 formats for your content out of the gate, which is effort, but hey, that’s the job as a publisher: get your content out to as many people as possible. If syndicating into another format is where people are, it’s likely worth doing.”

Of course I’m biased but having an RSS or JSON Feed is important to the syndication of your weblog or web site.

Also, dear podcasters large and small, please add an RSS option to the list of places folks can get your podcast and make sure folks know it. Thank you.

Reuters: “Oct 17 (Reuters) - Parlement Technologies, the parent company of social media app Parler, said on Monday that it will be acquired by rapper Kanye West, who legally changed his name to simply Ye last year.”

Not to be outdone by his good buddy Elon Musk, Kanye West has been conned into purchasing white supremacist and conspiracist stronghold, Parler.

How long until it disappears?

Vice: “But either way, 5.7 million is a lot, and one of the elements managing it is an operating system that fell into obscurity a quarter-century ago: IBM’s OS/2.”

This is extremely cool. I know there are a lot of OS/2 fans in the world, lord knows I ran into a lot of them during my time at Visio. They’re rabid! 😄

I need to know more about this now and it’s nice to see a reliable system continue to do what it was intended to do.

If it were written today it would probably be some JavaScript monstrosity.

Politico: “In the early days of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Hill warned in an interview with POLITICO that what Putin was trying to do was not only seize Ukraine but destroy the current world order. And she recognized from the start that Putin would use the threat of nuclear conflict to try to get his way.”

Ah, yes, more Musk, the fragrance that lingers. Not only is he trying to destroy Twitter he’s trying to bring about the destruction of Ukraine and Democracy and set himself up to be ruler of the world.

Scary.

Tiny Apple Core

I was leaning on the good old heating pad and had to get up for a bit.

Flynn decided it was a nice warm spot to lie down. 😂

COVID bivalent vaccine in the arm. 👍🏼💉

Kolby very impatiently waiting for his pup cup.

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning fellow coffee and tea drinkers! Grab a cup, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.☕️

Cold Espresso

CNN: “Robbie Coltrane, the actor who brought to life the lovable gamekeeper Hagrid in the Harry Potter film franchise, died on Friday, according to his agent, Scott Henderson. He was 72.”

This is so heartbreaking. Our beloved Hagrid is gone. Mr. Coletrane, of course, appeared in many other films but he will always be Hagrid to me.

RIP 💔

Sketch - Via LinkedIn: “Today is a very tough day for everyone at Sketch. In response to challenging market conditions and with a desire to keep our product-first strategy, we’ve taken the difficult decision to reduce our team by just over 80 people. This will mostly impact Operations and Marketing, who have done great work in the recent weeks and months. Our Product team remains well-equipped, with a core team continuing to drive things forward.”

This is a real bummer to see. In my mind Sketch is a prime example of a modern Mac application done right. I know many designers who use it daily. To see such a reduction in workforce makes your heart sink. All those people looking for work toward the end of the year.

On the flip side there are now many very qualified Mac and iOS developers on the market. Go find one and hire them.

Also, why in the world wouldn’t you put this on the company blog or as a standalone news announcement on your own website?

Fortune: “Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna…things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

William Shatner is a Canadian Treasure, I originally said American Treasure but a friend corrected me. He’s still an American Treasure if you ask me. 😁 I don’t know what more say, other thank this: We must protect our planet. It’s the only place that can sustain life we’re aware of. Even if we found another planet it would be impossible to reach.

It couldn’t have happened to a better man. Now, get this jerk off the airwaves.

Yahoo! News: “The House select committee held its 10th and possibly final public hearing on Thursday, presenting new evidence stemming from its 15-month investigation into the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

Well, well, well, TFG will finally get his subpoena. Of course he’ll worm his way out of it, like he always does. Here’s hoping the Justice Department gets him.

CNN: “Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd delighted “Back to the Future” fans when they were reunited at the weekend, 37 years after the release of the sci-fi comedy.”

I love this film series. My favorite episode is the third and final installment. They’re all very good of course but the third one is best.

Axios: “Google has approved Donald Trump’s Twitter-like social media app Truth Social for distribution in the Google Play Store, Axios has learned.”

This company is doomed to failure. Besides, if Musk gets his hands on Twitter, which is highly likely, TFG will be allowed back on to continue his reign of terror unabated. That sucks.

Fast Company: “With 15,000 locations across the U.S., the coffee chain is betting it can convince electric vehicle owners that it’s the perfect place to charge up. (Literally!)”

Starbucks has some much bigger fish to fry with workers form unions and their attempts to bust those unions but this is an interesting idea.

I was going to question why a company like McDonalds wasn’t interested in doing something like this but Starbucks is definitely a more high end brand. It’s a place folks spend “disposable” income.

That’s right Peter! You tell ‘em!

Hey! Did you know I developed a feed reader for iOS called Stream? That’s right, I did, no, really, I did! It’s free in the App Store but you’re welcome to leave a tip. 😄

Tiny Apple Core

Kim and the grandkids had fun today. I hope she brought one home! 😄

These are mummy brownies.

I’d mentioned a few days back I always look out the kitchen window into our back yard looking for deer. It paid off this morning. My wife and I watched three grazing along our back fence. 🦌

They’re so beautiful.

Federated vs. Centralized

Hacker News Comment: “This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren’t looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move.”

I really love seeing this take. It’s the first reply to this Hacker News post on the shutdown of mastodon.technology. Yes, it is a sad day amongst folks in the Fediverse, especially for folks on mastodon.technology but the network persists because it’s federated with other instances. The folks who are losing their accounts will be able to move to another instance or perhaps spin up their own!

It some ways it’s like having your own blog. If you decide to stop writing and let the domain lapse your writing will disappear but the internet of blogs continues to march along.

I’ve heard so many folks say Mastodon isn’t a good substitute to Twitter but if it isn’t, what is?

Once Elon Musk has Twitter it would be fantastic to see Twitter implement the protocols necessary to participate in the Fediverse.

What does that even mean?

It means Twitter would write some code that would allow Mastodon based servers to find it and render Twitter tweets into a unified timeline of users.

It would allow a Twitter of Twitters to blossom. Sure, Twitter is a for profit company and others could have for profit Mastodon instances but it wouldn’t be required. All that’s required is the will to fire up an instance.

A true open social experience

Folks like Manton Reese, the creator of Micro.blog, have already implemented these protocols to allow Micro.blog to federate with other Mastodon instances! In fact, I follow quite a few folks on Micro.blog from my Mastodon account on my instance, curmudgeon.cafe.

I could also see news papers, streaming companies, and movie studios running their own instances. Think of names on services like @wolfblitzer@cnn.social for Wolf Blitzer, @maggie@nytimes.social for Maggie Haberman, or @maddow@msnbc.social for Rachel Maddow. Of course I made all those names up and each of those companies may choose to use a different domain extension for their federated servers, but you get the picture.

Those custom domain names can’t be used on Twitter today because it’s completely centralized as opposed to the open, federated, system employed by Mastodon.

The really nice benefit to the federated system is the survivability of the network. If one system disappeared the remainder of the systems continue to operate. There is no set of central servers.

Hey! That’s how the internet is built!

Latest Halloween themed flag.

Oy, I have a domain queued up and ready to purchase. I don’t need another domain, I don’t need another domain, I don’t need another domain.

I let a few lapse recently. Maybe that makes it ok to buy this one? 🤔

Saturday Morning Coffee

Gotta keep it brief today my granddaughter is visiting so it’s busy. 😄

Spicy Mexican Coffee

Petapixel: “It doesn’t look good for Meta as the company is trading at its lowest stock value since 2019, advertisers are dropping spending, and users are leaving its platforms.”

Couldn’t have happened to a better company.

As you can tell, I don’t like Facebook.

Cal Newport: “As I recently discovered, however, the bestselling fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson put us all to shame. His home office heroics began in 2008, when he and his wife bought a nondescript house in a nondescript Utah suburb.”

Go read the article. I now want to do what he did.

The Atlantic: “Yesterday, the world got a look inside Elon Musk’s phone. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is currently in litigation with Twitter and trying to back out of his deal to buy the platform and take it private. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk.”

Tech bros at their “best.”

Barn Finds: “The 1956 Golden Hawk was one of the many derivatives of the Studebaker Starliner, craftily styled by Raymond Loewy.”

I want this car for my collection! Of course I don’t have a collection but if I did I’d want this one.

Ash Furrow: “I have sad news that I have decided to shut down the mastodon.technology instance. In accordance with the Mastodon Server Covenant, the server will be shut down no earlier than December 1, 2022.”

It’s a bummer to see Ash go through a rough time and it’s completely understandable why he’s shutting it down.

Tiny Apple Core