Flynn loves getting his ears scratched.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Another week, gone. We’re picking up the grandkids this morning so I’ll have to get this put together quickly this morning. Sorry, grandpa duty calls! 👴🏼
I’m finishing this off in the car as we go to get them. 🤣
Hope you enjoy the links.
Max Boot • The Washington Post
The GOP’s abandonment of Ukraine makes me ashamed to be an American
This is gut wrenching. Ukraine is standing between Russia and Europe. That nutter in Russia isn’t going to stop at Ukraine. He’ll go until someone can stop him.
Come on G.O.P., get your crap together and defend democracy. Oh, right, you no longer care about that.
Spotify is ending 2023 with its third and biggest layoffs of the year
Man, 2023 has been a crummy year for tech workers. Here’s hoping 2024 is much, much, better.
James Verniere • Boston Herald
“Leave the World Behind,” which is based on a 2020 novel by American author Rumaan Alam and produced by among others Barrack and Michelle Obama, is nothing less than a modern-day version of Alfred Hitchcock’s unforgettable 1963 hit “The Birds.”
I watched this last night and I really liked it. If you have Netflix check it out.
Once upon a time — way back in, like, 2004 or something — I used to turn my nose up at sites that served an RSS feed with only an excerpt. It felt, I think I would have said, like a sleazy way to drive clicks. (“Information wants to be free!” etc. 🙄) Twenty years on I still read a ton from RSS feeds, but I found recently that I’m starting to thaw on that position quite a bit.
Ashur, what happened to the curmudgeon in you? 😃
As a developer of a feed reader I get request to display the full article and it’s what I prefer so I don’t have to visit the website. That’s a feature on the feature list for Stream. One of these days.
Introducing Mammoth 2: The easiest way quit Twitter/X for good and join Mastodon
It’s nice to see developers strive to make Mastodon work for old Twitter, non techie, users to get started with Mastodon. That’s been the biggest barrier to entry. Folks can’t figure out how to join and they also tend to like recommendations.
Earlier this year, a developer slid into Eric Migicovsky’s DMs with a spectacular claim: that he had reverse engineered Apple’s iMessage, allowing any device — Android, Windows, whatever — to send messages as a blue bubble. Migicovsky didn’t believe what he was reading.
This is an interesting read. Bravo to the 16-year old who figured it out!
But Overcast does exist, and it’s the app where most people with exquisite taste in UI are listening to podcasts.
Poor Castro has languished and definitely doesn’t have the geek recognition Overcast does. I’d imagine that’s why it’s the number one podcast player in John’s stats.
As far as UI preferences and paradigm go, Castro fits me better.
I’d love to be able to buy it from Tiny and keep working on it. I’ve already shared my opinion on the matter.
Aldous J Pennyfarthing • Daily Kos
House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose grand vision for America includes transforming every uterus in the country into a Pez dispenser, is convinced he’s the North American Moses who will lead his people to the Promised Land.
Yeah, this guy wants a theocracy. No thank you.
Sure, the Christians might agree with you but what about Jews, Muslims, Buddhists? Name your religion. It’s not right. Our First Amendment was setup to protect us from a theocracy, but we all know the G.O.P. doesn’t really care about the Constitution.
The Comixology app, the mobile incarnation of the digital comics platform owned by Amazon since 2014, has finally shuffled off this mortal coil.
I’ve had ComiXology for a number of years but I never went for the subscription. I just don’t read enough. I don’t see this as a bad move. Comics are just another type of book and the Kindle App is fine for reading.
While four teams are celebrating the opportunity to play for a national title on the field, undefeated ACC champion Florida State is on the outside, becoming the first unbeaten Power 5 conference winner to ever miss out on the College Football Playoff.
This broke a lot of hearts and it’s a real shame the 12 team — why not 16 — playoff wasn’t in place this year.
Of course I say that and my own thoughts on the matter didn’t include Florida State.
I also thought Georgia should have been in. Off by one error. We got Alabama from the SEC instead.
Apple TV+ today shared the first images from “Constellation,” a new eight-part, conspiracy-based psychological thriller drama starring Noomi Rapace (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “You Won’t Be Alone”) and Emmy Award nominee Jonathan Banks (“Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”).
So, yeah, I’m looking forward to this! Anything with Noomi Rapace in it is good in my book.
Let’s implement a custom dark mode color in our app - dark blue.
Really nice SwiftUI article on how to change the colors used for Light and Dark mode for your app. Well done.
This is a picture of Kim and I in 1986. She’s still that beautiful. ❤️
Stream for Mac; SwiftUI or AppKit?
So, I have Stream for iOS and Mac (underway.) Stream is UIKit on iOS and I have the Mac version started with AppKit. The code shared between the two is high; networking, parsers, persistence, view models, utility support, all shared. What’s not? That’s right, the UI.
This is where my brain kind of locks up. Do I continue to invest in AppKit or do I do the Mac version of the app using SwiftUI (worst technology name ever?)
My SwiftUI knowledge is so rudimentary it feels like I’m spinning my wheels and wasting time trying to get Stream for Mac built and shipped using SwiftUI. On the flip side AppKit is also foreign but UIKit is so similar to AppKit that I get the paradigms and most of the API’s feel familiar.
Some of my original motivation was a desire to learn more about AppKit so I could try to get a job with someone like Panic or The Iconfactory, but the truth of the matter is I’m in my final act of my career and jumping to a company of that stature probably isn’t in the cards. I even gave up on my dream of working for Apple quite a while back.
Now my desire is to do the best work I can with Stream and start working on a companion app to it.
I sit here this morning trying to convince myself to do a couple iOS features for Stream and ship it so I can focus on bringing the SwiftUI based Stream to macOS. While my focus will be on the macOS all the work I do will be applicable to the iOS and iPadOS versions since the code can largely be shared between all three. Yes, even more code than is currently shared. We’re talking shared UI code and that sounds really attractive.
Has anyone seen Flynn? No? 🤣
Castro’s Future
We believe in transparency with our community and want to share with you that we are actively seeking a new home for Castro with new owners. Our goal is to continue providing you with the app you love, but with even better features and improvements.
Earlier in the week Castro had a four day(I believe) outage of their backend service, Tentacles. 🐙
Thankfully they were able to get things repaired.
Now it appears the folks at Tiny are shopping Castro around. That’s great news! Earlier in the week I sent Tiny a note mentioning I was interested in Castro. Do I have a shot at it? Heck no! Would I love a chance? Heck yeah!
What would I do with it?
Well, that’s a really good question. I have to believe their overhead is extremely high because of their reliance on custom backend service. Here’s where my thinking may go off the rails. Why do podcast apps need their own service to aggregate content?
Podcasting is built on an open standard, RSS. Apple have built the best podcast directory on the planet using RSS as its base and they allow folks to use it. Thank you, Apple!
Now, my friend, John Brayton, believes the directory isn’t complete enough to do what I’m after. That’s ok as long as it allows searching. With the ability to search and get basic podcast information I believe it could be done without a custom, expensive, backend service. Marco Arment the creator of the Overcast podcast player once said on ATP that his server costs are over $8000/month (if my memory isn’t failing me, which is very possible.🧠 Keep me honest here.)
Stream has a feed parser that works really well and could be extended and reused for a Podcast player. All you really need for a Podcast player is the ability to take an RSS feed, parse it, and display information about the episode. RSS includes the link to the audio file.
Castro has a way to search for podcasts and has a hand curated list of recommendations. If you can search Apple’s directory you cover item number one. Item number two is easy, it’s hand curated so that’s not an issue. Once you have the location of an RSS feed you can list and play a podcast.
Of course the thing that blows this thinking up is if Apple’s directory isn’t searchable.
If you’re the maker of a podcast player and have a custom backend please let me know how I’m wrong here, because I must have a knowledge gap. 🙏🏼
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
All the Thanksgiving leftovers are long gone and I celebrated my 56th birthday this week. I got my free birthday coffee at Starbucks, had BBQ for dinner, and chocolate cake for dessert. Luckily the cake didn’t have 56 candles on it. That would’ve been bad. 😃
I hope you had a great week and enjoy the links.
Robert Kagan • Washington Post
Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence.
I can’t see how trials and even convictions can stop Trump from becoming our next President.
Only we, the people, can stop it. If we don’t stop him we’ve lost our nation.
VOTE!🇺🇸
This is a substantial update to MarsEdit 5, featuring all new support for the Mastodon publishing system, which is used to host a large number of independently operated Twitter-like microblogging services.
I’ve been a MarsEdit user off and on for well over a decade. This classic Mac assed Mac App is fast, stable, is great at what it does, and has a developer who cares deeply about it and the Mac.
It’s well worth its $59.95 price tag.
It’s time for an opinion. I wish this were subscription based for Daniel’s sake. He depends heavily on major releases and upgrades to keep his business afloat. This is where I believe subscription pricing could help. Her could do something like $9.99/yr, or $0.99/mo, then he could get off the upgrade cycle train and just add features whenever they’re ready. He provides excellent support and fixes bugs on a regular basis.🚂
Of course I’m not a successful indie giving advice to a man with a long established company and app, so there you go.😃
Capo was not playing audio for some users on Intel Macs running Sonoma. After spending almost two weeks (and about $850) I discovered that macOS Sonoma had a rather nasty bug that was triggered by loading JPEG images.
I love a good debugging story. 🐞
Sophie McEvoy • gamesindustry.biz
Xbox is working with unknown partners to open a mobile storefront to rival the App Store and Google Play.
It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft can actually make a nice experience for mobile users. Beyond that will Apple no longer demand their 15-30% take, even if on another store? I very much doubt it.
It’s been more than six years since images of a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., shocked the world — hundreds of people with tiki torches chanted antisemitic slurs, and a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed.
When this all went down I wasn’t at all familiar with Charlottesville. We were living in California and little did I know we’d move to the area in 2019.
When I started at WillowTree we were located in downtown Charlottesville and I had no idea Heather Heyer was murdered right by our office. It was pretty surreal the first time I walked by it and realized this was the place.
I took this photo five days after my start date with WillowTree.
This week OpenAI had a fantastic keynote at their Dev Day event. They announced new products and enhancements to ChatGPT[1]. Interestingly, some parts of the internet described the keynote as an “Extinction Event”[2] for many AI startups. Many of the startups reportedly facing extinction share the common trait of being thin wrappers over OpenAI’s APIs.
I don’t think Nish sleeps at all. He’s into everything and is well versed in every topic he talks about.
Always worth a read when he shows up in my feed.
Rep. George Santos survived the first two attempts to expel him from Congress. The third vote, however, led to the New York Republican’s ouster.
Well, what do you know. Some folks actually do have an ethics line. Took long enough for them to find it. 🤬
Earlier this week I had a need to manually find a bunch of people’s RSS feed links. It seemed simple enough: go to their website and look for an RSS/Subscribe link but I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed.
I see where Robb is coming from. He’s after a link of image with a link to your sites RSS file.
Most modern feed readers will auto discover feeds by looking in your sites head for a specific alt tag.
Sites should embrace the tag based method but it doesn’t hurt to include a link somewhere.
Debbie Truong • Los Angeles Times
Montiel, an environmental science major, and Butterfield, a journalism major, had lived in their vehicles for several years, the only way, they said, that they could afford to attend college. They usually found parking in campus lots or on nearby streets.
There was a time when we lived in California where I thought I’d have to get a job in the Bay Area because tech in the San Joaquin Valley is hard to find. I was thinking I’d drive in from Exeter on Monday morning, stay the week, and return home Friday afternoon. I was planning to put a shell on my truck and turn the bed of the truck into my home.
For my first year of employment at LEVEL Studios in 2009-10 I did something similar but I found a room to rent for $250/month.
I doubt you could find anything close to that in the Silicon Valley.
There is another reason why I stopped developing Gluon, for now, and time will heal this. It’s personal. I never said this publicly, but here we are. Funny how one individual in a nice community can just blow everything up 💥 I had super strong feelings about this today, and I can’t get it out my head. Hence this post I guess.
Vincent’s app, Gluon, is an excellent app for Micro.blog. For the longest time it was much better than the first party app and it was my iOS App of choice for Micro.blog.
I wish you nothing but joy and happiness, Vincent. Thank you for all of your hard work making Micro.blog a better place.
Anita Chabria • Los Angeles Times
A unicorn costume, a hammer and a belief that pedophiles are using public schools to destroy democracy: The trial of David DePape for attacking Paul Pelosi was strange and disturbing.
This attack on Paul Pelosi was just about as weird as it gets. The dude who did it was so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole he was seeing pedophiles everywhere. These people are the GOP’s base. They’ll believe anything no matter how wild the story. Remember the lizard people who drink children’s blood for the adrenochrome? Yeah, that’s something these people believe.
They all need extreme therapy to repair their addled minds.
Ms. Gracie makes a fine pillow, at least Flynn thinks so. 😀
Stream Numbers
Hiring The Iconfactory to do the artwork for Stream’s App Store feature was such a no brainer and I believe helped catapult my sustained download numbers! ❤️
I’d get about three downloads a day prior to the feature. Now I’m sustaining a much higher average. Grateful.
Has it resulted in gobs and gobs of money coming my way? No. That’s ok. I’m still very grateful!
Ms. Gracie thinks the leaves are the best thing ever.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I know I did! It’s a time for family and wonderful food at the Fahrni household, especially the pies! Kim’s pumpkin and Haileigh’s Pecan pie are amazing and I always eat a little too much of each. 😋
Some have wondered why the Trump campaign is being so open about the repressive policies they intend to implement. This “transparency” is in line with authoritarian history: Autocrats often tell you who they are and what they intend to do to you before they take office. They do this as a challenge to norms, and they do this as a threat.
If TFG is elected again and destroys our Democracy we will deserve everything we get and I hate the thought of it happening.
Where will people immigrate to if our democracy comes to an end in favor of an autocracy? Canada? Germany? Some other European nation not caught up in this current authoritarian wave?
Anita Chabria • Los Angeles Times
A unicorn costume, a hammer and a belief that pedophiles are using public schools to destroy democracy: The trial of David DePape for attacking Paul Pelosi was strange and disturbing.
It’s frightening how folks can go down these rabbit holes so quickly and turn into complete, frothing at the mouth, lunatics. 😳
Music streaming service Spotify struck a seemingly unique and highly generous deal with Google for Android-based payments, according to new testimony in the Epic v. Google trial.
Well, well, well, good for Spotify. I’m sure any indie app maker would take a deal like that but it’s always the “big guys” that get preferable treatment.
It can’t hurt that Spotify is a direct competitor to Apple Music and puts a dent in Apple’s bottom line because of it. Not that it’s hurting Apple. 🤣
Monday was a day that crystallized on just how many levels our democracy and its promises stand on a precarious perch.
So a Colorado judge found that his Orangeness is in fact responsible for the insurrection. She also said he’s still eligible to run for President because the 14 Amendment doesn’t apply to the President because he was not “an officer of the United States” that could be disqualified under the amendment.
What?! That makes no sense. 😳
James Boyd and Dianna Russini • The Athletic
Former Colts LB Shaquille Leonard goes unclaimed on waivers: How injuries derailed his stellar run in Indy
Hearing this bummed me out. I like Shaq Leonard. He’s a true leader on and off the field and he has a motor that won’t stop.
Here’s hoping he finds a new team soon and is able to get fully healthy and back on the field.
Heck, even if things are over for him prematurely, due to injury, he’s had a great career.🏈
I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google’s culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don’t join an organisation without a moral compass.
Interesting read from an 18-year employee of Google. Companies change as they grow. It’s just a fact. WillowTree has changed tremendously since I joined in 2019, especially after the Telus International acquisition. It happens as companies get bigger. ❤️
NFL denounces hate speech, says it has expressed concerns to Elon Musk’s X
Sure, like Space Karen is going to listen to the puny NFL.
Some advice for the NFL. Get off of X, start a Mastodon instance called nfl.social, and start doing whatever it is you use X for on your Mastodon instance. Problem solved. You’re welcome.
Adobe has been issued with a formal antitrust complaint by EU regulators regarding its $20 billion bid for cloud-based product design platform Figma.
I wonder what kind of deal Adobe will have to strike to make this work? It’s obvious Figma is winning the hearts and minds of designers. I feel really bad for the likes of Sketch who are a native Mac only shop. Their work is beautiful and extremely useful but can it survive? I hope so!
Also, please stop using Figma for EVERYTHING in the company. I’ve seen folks make presentations with it and make project plans with it and both of those uses really sucked.
You might as well hitch your wagon to Musk with Krazy Glue at this point, Linda, because despite what your deluded pals on Madison Avenue might think, there’s no going back now. Stacking the events of the past week on top of the mound of insanity that’s already piled high over the course of your short reign has seen to that.
Good luck, Linda. I hope the man is at the very least paying you crap tons of money to destroy your good name and reputation.
Maybe it’s all worth it to her for that CEO title? 🤔
First part of an in-depth guide into developing a native macOS application using Haskell with Swift and SwiftUI. This part covers the set-up required to call Haskell functions from Swift in an XCode project using SwiftUI.
I love seeing other languages integrated into applications! VBA on Windows apps was a huge benefit to app users and gave them the ability to create specialized scripts to help automate their workflows. Even with all of the security implications and exploits it is the best implementation of a scripting environment to date.
I’ve also seen folks integrate Lua with great success and look at how the integration of JavaScript into native iOS and Android apps — ala React Native — has changed the app landscape.
Following on from the previous memory leak I have demonstrated in the Finder in macOS 14.1.1, here’s a second, discovered by Kate, which might have a common root cause.
I have questions. Is this a leak or is it memory consumption? Those are two different things. One is not freeing resources because of a coding error, the other is not freeing resources intentionally. An intentional case would be caching things in memory to improve performance.
Also, if the system needs memory at some point and can’t find enough does the Finder relinquish this memory back to the OS?
Either way I suppose it can be seen as a leak. At the very least it could be a performance problem if system performance degrades because of it.
What I’m saying is that Apple sometimes takes its failures and learns important lessons that inform its future attempts… but sometimes, it seems to just give up.
Apple is a company of people and people make mistakes.
I feel like the Vision Pro could be a mistake. Maybe mistake is too harsh a word? Maybe it’s just a product that’s too immature at the moment? I’m sure they’ll sell a hojillion of them on day one but will there be a great app ecosystem to support it?
My guess is highly specialized applications will drive sales but what do I know? Not much. 😂
Harvey’s urgency, even 12 hours later, is a reflex: This is exactly what she did for 13 years as the head of Twitter’s trust and safety team.
It must have been almost impossible to squelch all the crazy and hate on Twitter. Now X just doesn’t care and allows all the crazy and hate to blossom.
Get out, now. ☢️
Last month, Google launched a new feature for Chrome called IP Protection that makes it easier for the company to spy on you. No surprise, since this is Google’s business model. But what’s concerning is that Google is marketing this as a privacy feature.
I don’t know much about this but it seems like something I need to better understand.
I’m a Safari user and I mix Firefox in there.
I had to install Chrome at work because a client has some Chrome friendly tools we need to use. 😮
Nilay Patel and Alex Heath • The Verge
After an attempted coup by OpenAI’s board that lasted five days, Altman is returning alongside co-founder Greg Brockman.
Dizzying. I hope Altman keeps a good set of ethicists around him to keep him in check.
We don’t want the robots to take over the world, do we. 🤖
It is this type of definition, however, that holds RSS back. Why does it just have to be updates to a website? RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information. Once you start adding custom namespaces the possibilities are amazing.
I agree with Colin. RSS can be used for many things and why not? It’s extensible and there are gobs of tooling for it.
Just think of what it did for Podcasting.
I know at one someone maintained an RSS feed of hospitals with extra drugs other hospitals could ask for. You’d be surprised how many hospitals run out of certain drugs and how many have a surplus. It was a nice way to connect folks. Yet another niche served by RSS.
I’ve had the thought of just publishing my blog as RSS only. Sure, discovery would suck, but feed readers are just another type of web browser, only the web comes to the feed reader.😃
Happy Birthday President Biden! 🥳🎂🔥🚒
Siri tells me this is a Giant Leopard Moth. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful.
Ms. Gracie has had a rough week. She was neutered and developed an infection at her incision site and has a small opening as a result. She’s been in her cone most of the time but when she gets it off she’s so happy and playful.
But now, time for a nap.
Matt Mullenweg on Messages and RCS
I’ve heard stories of teenagers being ostracized because they couldn’t afford an iPhone, of group chats rejecting people who turn the chat from blue to green. I know that sounds petty, but do you remember middle school? It’s about status, and Apple knows that. Everything they make bleeds status and signaling. They’re the best in the world at it, and I should know—I’m typing this post from a M3 Max black MacBook with 128GB of RAM. But while status signaling with amazing hardware and design touches is harmless, in software and social settings in can be harmful.
I have suspicions about the Messages API. Apple are keeping it close to their chest for one or more good reasons. Could it be seriously flawed if not used in a very specific way? Sure, that’s plausible. Is it probable? Who the heck knows? I certainly don’t. Apple aren’t know for their network services abilities. Some folks have great experiences, others live with a complete mess. It’s a crap shoot. If you’re a developer of iOS and/or Mac Apps and used CloudKit for anything you’ve most likely experienced frustrated users because their data isn’t syncing. Like I said earlier, it’s a crap shoot and Apple don’t seem to care enough to enhance these frameworks and services. Gotta push on with those new features for next years OS updates!
Another reason they may be keeping it to themselves is the most likely scenario. It’s a competitive advantage like no other on the iPhone. I’d put money on this being the reason any day. Question is, why can’t they have a competitive advantage?
Steve Jobs initially pledged to make available as an open standard but ultimately restricted to iOS devices. iMessage availability has been a particular sore point in the rivalry between Android and iOS, with iMessage’s “green bubbles” attaching significant social stigma to Android phones. - Russell Brandom • The Verge
What I’d like to see is Apple create a new team just for the RCS Messaging app and fully embrace the specification. This would allow them to seep their “blue bubble” app nice and clean and give folks a full featured and secure RCS experience. Sure, iPhone and Mac users would have to use two separate apps, so what. It’ll get Google and EU regulators off their back and allow Apple to keep Messages less complicated.
As an aside, being able to create a new RCS app from scratch would allow Apple to make a 100% from the ground up SwiftUI experience for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. That would be really nice in my opinion. Apple need to build a new, preferably larger, app in SwiftUI to show the world how it’s done and to eat their own dog food.
I also have a question for the Messages team. Why isn’t the Messages icon blue, like the bubbles in the app? Seems like it should be.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Up early this morning to drive our youngest daughter to the airport for a trip to California. I’m a little jealous. Thanksgiving in California with our wider family sounds amazing.
I’m still very much enjoying the current project I’m on at work and I wish I could spend the next five years on it. That would be perfectly fine with me, but I believe I’ll be wrapped up early next year then who knows what’s next? 😃
Time for some linkage.
In a post on OpenAI’s official blog, the company writes that Altman’s departure follows a “deliberative review process by the board” that concluded that Altman “wasn’t consistently candid in his communications” with other board members, “hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”
This whole situation is weird and the announcement sounds rushed and leaves one scratching their head.
Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI, learned that OpenAI was ousting CEO Sam Altman just a minute before the news was shared with the world, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The firing of Altman seems so rushed. Why wouldn’t the board have taken a bit longer making the decision so they could warn their partners ahead of time?
Microsoft is heavily invested in OpenAI. I can’t imagine they’re happy about how this went down.
As for folks who don’t spend their time macro-blogging—“ordinary people” who use rather than spend significant chunks of their day creating web content—Tai points out that this, statistically at least a more important issue than the fate and choices of the artists formerly known as digerati, remains unsolved, but with glimmers of partially solution-shaped indicators in the form of a re-emerging indieweb impulse:
Long live blogs and the indie web. If you’re blogging you’re not answering a the whims of a corporation who could lock you out at any time and can make money off of your hard work.
Own your content. Start a blog and link it everywhere.
CONCORD, N.H. - A suspect is dead after a shooting at New Hampshire State Hospital in Concord Friday afternoon. Police say the situation is now “contained” and all patients at the hospital are safe.
GUNS, GUNS, GUNS, America loves gun.
The GOP likes to say it’s a mental health issue. Fine, let’s get laws and required training so the people with mental health issues don’t get their hands on guns. Right?
The blue versus green bubble debate may finally be winding down. Apple says, in 2024, the iPhone will add support for RCS messaging, the messaging standard used by most Android phones, according to a report from 9to5Mac.
I hope Apple builds this as a separate app. Keep those blue and green bubbles separate. If they do it gives them a chance to build something new in SwiftUI from the word go. That would be really nice to see.
If they have to make it part of Messages hopefully they do it in a way that doesn’t totally screw up the Messages UI.
Oh, and I really hope they keep their own messaging platform.
Jonathan M. Gitlin • Ars Technica
GM will build F1 powertrains in 2028 as long as F1 lets Andretti in
I’m so down with this and am hopeful Andretti Cadillac are given a charter. American racing needs to have a presence it what some see as the premier racing league in the world. There are only 20 drivers in the F1 world today. Two drivers from each of 10 teams. Expanding the grid by two would be amazing, and having an American company producing power units for that team would be absolutely incredible. Here’s hoping Haas does a deal with Ford. 😃
Automattic’s recent announcement that Tumblr is being put into maintenance mode feels like the end of a personal era. Tumblr wasn’t just another social network; it was a cultural phenomenon, a haven for the eclectic and the expressive, where the internet’s fringes found a voice and a community.
I’d hate to see Tumblr disappear. It’s different than WordPress or Facebook or Mastodon or any other blogging platform. It has a different feel to it that’s difficult to describe but Joan’s use of eclectic is a great choice. We need networks like that on the web.
Here’s hoping it finds a way to keep on keepin on. 🤞🏼
UPDATED, with White House comment: TikTok announced today that it was removing videos that have popped up on the platform in which users of various ages and ethnicities promote Osama bin Laden‘s “Letter to America,” which he had written to justify the attacks on 9/11.
I’ve never seen the video or read the transcript but I’d imagine it lays out his point in a way which makes perfect sense. The problem is, the man was a terrorist. He was all about exterminating the west and western culture. These folks are true believers and they put their money where their mouth is by killing innocent people to further their views.
Earlier in the week I said we were lucky on January 6 when the Capitol was stormed. Those folks were not serious people or it would’ve gotten much, much, worse and they wouldn’t have left.
I feel like the Christian Nationalist movement is on the path to becoming an American terrorist organization and they want to run the nation. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s what Gaza has/had with Hamas in charge.
A theocracy in the United States will not work.
The next step was to give this new product a name. After several weeks of trial and error we landed on “xScope”. The “X” worked for both the operating system and the “examination” done by the tool. All the assets and websites were put in place and we got ready to launch with our unique tool with a unique name.
A hearty congratulations to one of my favorite companies in the world! I’ve been a user of xScope for a number of years now and it’s extremely handy for looking at screen layouts at the pixel level.
Highly birthday!🥳
Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?”
Folklore is a great site if you’re at all interested in Apple’s early days. So many amazing stories.
On Wednesday at the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft announced two custom chips designed for accelerating in-house AI workloads through its Azure cloud computing service: Microsoft Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator and the Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 CPU.
This is really cool and exciting! I hope Microsoft realizes performance boosts and energy savings in their Azure data centers.
Now, how do I get one for my desktop Windows computer. 😁
The iOS UI framework landscape shifted in 2019 with the introduction of SwiftUI, a first-party declarative UI framework that accomplishes many of the same goals as Epoxy. Although SwiftUI was not a good fit for our needs during its first three years, by 2022 it offered increased stability and API availability. It was around this time that we started to consider adopting SwiftUI at Airbnb.
This will be fun to monitor. Airbnb tried to adopt React Native a few years back and abandoned the effort in favor of native development.
I have a feeling SwiftUI will stick. If you’re an iOS shop you don’t really have any choice. 😁
Google Rejected Max Howell(Creator Of Homebrew) For Getting This Interview Question Wrong. Can You?
There are plenty of amazing software developers working at smaller shops because they can’t get past these types of interviews.
I’d managed to get an interview with Google in 2018-19 timeframe and canceled it when I was told I’d have to study for a couple weeks before interviewing. I was given links to algorithms and other materials to prepare for the interview. I was also assigned a mentor to help me prepare. 😳
The job was working on Chrome for iOS.
I canceled the interview.
Employees frustrated with their CEOs’ return-to-office mandates have tried arguing that remote work is linked with greater productivity. That it helps the environment with fewer commutes and improves diversity by broadening the talent pool. Now, they may have another argument to get their CEOs’ attention: Higher revenue growth.
More support for the remote work lifestyle. When I read articles like this I always think about the other articles I’ve read about working from home being the devil.
Working from home works for me but not for everyone. I’ve even considered going into the office one to two days a week just for a change of pace. Kim asked me “Are you that desperate to get COVID again?” the other day when I mentioned possibly going into work one day next week. She’s not wrong. I definitely do not want COVID again. I got COVID in 2022 at a group onsite and was exposed to COVID at a recent onsite. My luck at the office hasn’t been great.
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies – an impression that has been reinforced almost daily – is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right.
This is a pretty long read so make sure your mug is full.
Neha Dwivedi • EssentiallySports
As it turns out, Kurt Busch has never been shy about wearing his heart on his sleeve, especially when it comes to his love for Formula 1. Flashback to June 2016, with NASCAR taking a week off, Busch jetted off to catch the Haas F1 Team in action at the Grand Prix of Europe in Azerbaijan, right after he qualified 17th for the FireKeepers Casino 400 at MIS.
I’d like to see some crossover between NASCAR and F1. Let’s start with Kyle Larson in an F1 ride and go from there. Maybe he could drive for Haas or the new Andretti Cadillac team? 😃
The Musk Files: Antisemitic Space Karen
Ashley Belanger • Ars Technica
Outcry over antisemitic content on X (formerly Twitter) continues as the White House condemns a post from X owner Elon Musk and IBM halts advertising on the platform after a Media Matters report showed one of its ads was placed next to pro-Hitler content.
Since purchasing Twitter we’ve seen the real Space Karen emerge. The hateful, antisemitic, homophobe, transphobe, racist, asshole has displayed his full colors.
How in the world does Tesla continue to employ this man? I supposed you have to look at the board and assume they share his hateful, white supremacist, views?
You’ll soon know who shares his hateful nature by what companies remain as advertisers on X.
Apple has famously remained an advertiser on X and I’m extremely disappointed in that. To abhor hate is not a bad thing. It’s time for everyone to stop advertising on X.
UPDATE:
A friend pointed out after I published this that Apple has indeed postponed advertising on X. It’s about darned time. 👍🏼
Apple is pausing all advertising on X, the Elon Musk-owned social network, sources tell Axios.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
This week was a bit of a struggle. I managed to catch a common cold — yes, I tested for COVID — and it’s just a darned drag. I’ve been working to complete a feature on a project at work and I had my bit all wrapped up and needed to tie it into another bit of code. Yesterday I took the day off, so it’ll have to wait until Monday. That bummed me out and was a terrible way to end an otherwise productive week.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told ABC News that he had “minor but real stroke” while attending the World Business Forum in Mexico City, confirming reports from Wednesday
Here’s hoping for a full and speedy recovery!
The latest update to Linea Sketch is now available! From textures to thumbnail cropping, version 4.3 is packed with clever new features to make sketching on your iPad easier and more fun than ever.
By now I think you all know about my deep love for The Iconfactory. They are the brains behind Twitterrific — may Ollie rest in peace — and Wallaroo. But they also make this amazing drawing app called Linea Sketch!
The Iconfactory also does design work and consultations. They recently did the artwork for Stream’s feature in the App Store . They’re extremely talented and so easy to work with. Give them a shout if you needs some design work!
If you’re an artist you should give it a try and see how you like it.
Hi, I’m Jim, an enthusiastic and dedicated home cook with more than a dozen Thanksgivings under my belt. I’ve hosted everything from small friendsgivings to giant multi-family affairs in foreign kitchens and I’ve assembled some strategies to help make the day great.
Jim is an internet pal and extremely nice fellow.
Thanksgiving FYI is Jim’s Thanksgiving newsletter chock full of tips and recipes for, you guessed it, Thanksgiving!
Who doesn’t like a good thanksgiving recipe?
I’d imagine you can still sign up and get everything he’s already published if you’d like and at $5 it’s a real steal! You even get access to a Slack so you can chat with others about the big day! 🦃
FYI, I’m Writing a Film Column For Uncanny Magazine
I didn’t know it but John Scalzi was a reporter for the Fresno Bee at one time. Wild!
It’s incredible to me how much work this man churns out in a year. Here’s hoping his column is well received and long lived.
It’s not quite the end of Tumblr, but when management is supposedly sending memos with the Lord Tennyson quote about having “loved and lost,” it doesn’t look like there’s much of a future.
I’ve had a Tumblr account for years and years and I cross post to it, like I do Mastodon, but I’ve never used it as my primary blog. I’d considered it multiple times but I was never happy with their fixed taxonomy. I like to publish my posts in a Y/M/D format and Tumblr doesn’t support that. They also don’t publish static HTML which is another strike against them.
I’m bummed out by the possibility of it disappearing. It’s one of those internet properties I’d like to see stick around. It’s also looks like they’re gonna drop ActivityPub. 😔
There’s no real way to gloss over the fact that Mac sales went down 34 percent versus the year-ago quarter. And yet, for some reason, Maestri and Cook got out their Tom Sawyer paintbrushes and got to work.
At some point hyper-growth will stop. It’s just the way it is. Of course Apple offsets this by raising prices, which isn’t a surprise.
I got my first M based Mac early last year and didn’t unwrap it and start using it until early summer because I felt that my x86 Mac was fine. Luckily I decided to take the plunge to M2 land because I went from being a Director back to being a Software Engineer.
For me I’d guess this M2 could easily go for five years before it feels sluggish, and who knows, maybe beyond that?
As I like to say. I’m not compiling Photoshop or Microsoft Word. I’m just compiling iOS Apps. Even big iOS apps written in Swift build super fast. I’d even wager an M1 MacBook Air would blow the doors off my old x86 based Mac. They’re fast!
Marc Anthony Lopez • abc30.com
The founders and co-CEOs of failed tech company Bitwise have been charged for a $100 million fraud scheme following a federal investigation.
This one hurts. I know Irma — Irms as everyone calls her — and Jake. I’m having a difficult time believing they’d do something illegal like this and I still want to believe it was a horrible blunder. 😔
Disney’s combined Disney Plus and Hulu streaming app is on the way. As part of its fourth-quarter earnings results, Disney announced it’s going to launch the new app in beta for bundle subscribers in December, with the official launch coming in early spring 2024.
We are Hulu subscribers, Kim loves it. It makes me wonder how much it’ll change or will it literally be merging what Hulu offers directly into the app? So far Max seems to be fine with this strategy, although I’d prefer to have HBO content front and center instead of the mix of items we have today. Here’s hoping they do a great job combining the properties. I think they will.
Telus has joined Rogers in offering an online tool for customers to manage their eSIMs.
Telus is the grandparent company of WillowTree so I had to share this news.
Mark Frauenfelder • Boing Boing
Trump plans to deploy military on Inauguration Day, seize government agencies, and purge critics
This doesn’t surprise me. I fully expect his next term (he’ll never leave) in office to be a full on MAGA revenge tour. Our democracy will fail under the strain. We cannot let this guy become President again.
Flynn is very attentive this morning. He’s trying to figure out what Mom is doing. 😃
The Musk Files - Definitely not a Genius
This guy is just like every other bully in the world. And to top it off he has money so he’s allowed to get away with behavior most people find abhorrent.
He ignores rules and laws and generally does whatever he wants free of consequence.
He’s a terrible human being.
Some of these links are fairly old since I haven’t posted one of these in a long time.
Yoel Roth • The New York Times
Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.
“This X shit’s got to go,” author Stephen King tweeted Thursday. That post received 71,000 likes by the end of the day. Elon Musk, creator of “this X shit,” responded to King with a “XX” and a winking-kiss emoji. Musk’s reply had a relatively tiny 7,300 likes at time of writing, despite the fact that Musk has 150 million more followers than King.
Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money. He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”
A year ago Elon Musk took over Twitter. Too much has happened in the 365 days that followed to even begin to chronicle it all here, but the short version is that he quickly fired 80% of the staff, broke a bunch of things, paid racists, misogynists, and homophobes to set up shop, picked (sometimes literal) fights with anyone who struck his fancy, lost billions of dollars, and changed the iconic name and logo to the letter X just because.
Zoe Schiffer • platformer.news
On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board issued its first complaint against Elon Musk’s X Corp. The board accused X of illegally firing Yao Yue, a widely respected principal engineer at the company, for pushing back on Musk’s return-to-office policy, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Platformer.
Eric Hananoki • mediamatters.org
X’s internal reporting system repeatedly responded that posts claiming “Hitler was right” and that there needs to be a “final solution” regarding Jewish people don’t violate the platform’s “safety policies.” This isn’t an isolated example: The Center for Countering Digital Hate similarly released a report today finding that X has failed to remove neo-Nazi content on its platform in numerous cases.
CNBC is running an excerpt from the new Walter Isaacson book about Elon that details what happened with the closing of the data center, and it is way, way, way crazier than even I expected. When Musk talked about how he “disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks,” he meant that entirely literally, in that he literally unplugged it, involving a series of improbable (and ridiculously dangerous and stupid) decisions that resulted with him under the floorboards in the data center pulling the plug, after multiple people warned him not to.
In July 2023, Mohammed al-Ghamdi, a Saudi Arabian Twitter user who had criticized the Kingdom’s corruption and human rights violations via an anonymous account with only 9 followers was sentenced to death.
Elon Musk plans to remove headlines from news articles shared on X
But the drones ran into a problem: Starlink, the satellite-communications system that Ukraine had been using since Russia invaded early last year, unexpectedly wasn’t working. This was a surprise to the engineers. Several people, in Ukraine and elsewhere, frantically called and texted Elon Musk, the owner of Starlink, to persuade him to enable the system.
Twitter, the social media platform officially known as X, appears to have deleted all images from the website that were posted between 2011 and 2014. Links that used Twitter’s native shortening service are also broken.
An NYU professor with 560,000 followers says he’s been locked out of his X account for over 2 weeks after declining to meet with Elon Musk
Casey Newton • platformer.news
Today let’s talk about a wild weekend of backtracking at the company formerly known as Twitter — and how it should inform the way we cover Elon Musk and his frequent promises in the future.
Nitish Pahwa and Nitish Pahwa • Slate
An Interview With the Guy Who Was @Music on Twitter Until Elon Musk’s X Took the Username Away
We’re almost back to gray stick mode. It’s amazing to me how our lush green forest turns into gray sticks so quickly. When I look at it in the spring and summer months it’s really difficult to believe it can look like this, yet here we are.
Welp, guess I’m not working in the yard today. 😂
Kim’s current flag is a good one. 🍁
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I haven’t reported on Ms. Gracie’s sleep schedule for a while. She’s finally — FINALLY — letting me sleep longer. It seems I can get to bed around 11:30 and she doesn’t need to do her business until 5:30 or so so. Sometimes 6:30! It’s been wonderful. Puppies really are like human babies in a lot of ways.
On with the links!
It’s called apelink.c and it’s a fine piece of poetry that weaves together the Portable Executable, ELF, Mach-O, and PKZIP file formats into shell scripts that run on most PCs and servers without needing to be installed.
This is kind of cool and, again, I like having an open solution folks could evolve.
I can’t figure out how to put together a good search query to find an article on it but macOS does this today with its application bundles. I suppose it’s not exactly the same but the idea certainly is.
The ideas Dave is talking about in this podcast are serious (even if he is laughing a lot), and he spells them out in text at a site called Textcasting.org.
I think I get what Dave is saying but I’d need to spend more time thinking about it. To get buy in from all the big platforms would mean either compromise or extensions to the format that only certain platforms would use. In other words, it’s a can of worms.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be done and that it’s not worth doing. It just means it’ll be difficult.
We already have blogs, links, and RSS. I publish posts to my blog to other sources automagically. But, that means my platform has to know how the API to that platform works. If there were a standard format for uploading RSS or some other structured document format I could see that being appealing.
Would the publisher push the changes to various other platforms or would each platform pull the post, like RSS works today? 🤔
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today that a Threads API is in the works. This will give developers a chance to create different apps and experiences around Threads.
I like it when API’s are created to open up platforms but I have a feeling this one will be extremely limited. And what happened to using ActivityPub and Fediverse support? Why not do that? Oh, right, it would mean completely opening Threads to developers. They don’t want that because they need those eyeballs clearly focused on Threads.
Hey, how about starting with RSS? Let me subscribe to a users RSS feed for their posts. That would be really nice and allow me to follow some brands without cluttering my Threads timeline.
Also, give us Mastodon integration. 😀
Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”
I know Jimmy Carter is seen as a Presidential failure by many, but there is no questioning his commitment to humanity and everything he’s given post Presidency. He’s a national treasure and someone we should listen to.
Of course nobody will. Nobody except we commoners not part of the political establishment.
I have no clue how to change this stuff but I’d like to see it happen. The unlimited money pouring into campaigns needs to be reined in.
Could a set of laws be created to give all campaigns an equal amount of money with equal amount of airtime and web presence to level the playing field?
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I’ve made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
This story made me chuckle a couple times. Corporations can get so bogged down in process and politics it’s amazing they can accomplish anything, much less a useful computing infrastructure.
Mike Johnson Hates America, But He Believes He Can Save It
It seems like Mr. Jones is quite the Christian Nationalist and hasn’t the slightest clue what our founding fathers intended for us.
Having a national religion is an abomination. The First Amendment to the Constitution is pretty clear on the matter.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It’s right there in black and white. We have the freedom to choose a religion. That can include Satanism. You don’t have to like it, you just have to live with it.
A new way to bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly
Here’s a bit of light technical reading for you! It’s incredible what hoops we jump through to achieve amazing things in computing.
I still believe the CLI standard should’ve been the runtime of choice for the browser.
We’re stepping back from the increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional ‘X’, and we’re sorry it’s taken this long
I suppose we’ll continue to see this. The big question is where do they land? They’ll probably have to have a presence on Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Threads.
Record labels and recording companies have been working to prevent artists from re-recording their albums like Taylor Swift, according to reports.
Can you blame artists for wanting to own the rights to their work? I certainly can’t.
The record labels should be ashamed. It’s kind of a scammy business and it’s too bad musical acts haven’t figured out a why to band together and move record labels out of the picture altogether.
I say that and of course I can’t do anything about my reliance on Apple to get my app in front of millions of people.
Jacquelyn Melinek • TechCrunch
Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty on all seven counts related to fraud and money laundering.
I guess he effed around and found out!
For me this brings up all the Orange Man trials. Why did this one happen so quickly and his are dragging out?
Anywho. I’m sure SBF will be taking these charges to the next higher court, then the next, and so on. The rich and famous have such an advantage in the legal system.
Elizabeth Blackstock • Jalopnik
It’s getting tough out there for the poor folks who have never faced systemic inequality but desperately want to feel oppressed. That’s why America First Legal — a conservative legal group led by Stephen Miller, a former adviser to former President Trump — is claiming that NASCAR is actually racist against white American men. That’s a first!
This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Have you ever watched a NASCAR race? It’s probably 99% white faces in the stands.
They’re just pissed NASCAR finally came into the 20th century and banned Confederate flags from NASCAR races.
Poor racists and their “But ma heritage!” Yeah, a heritage of hate and enslaving people. Great heritage. 🤬
Downtown Tech Office Shuts Down Its Free Cocktail Bar For Employees, CEO Says ‘The Office Is Dead’
Not even free booze could bring employees back to the office.
If you’re interested in socializing you should go to the office. It’s fine. I know a lot of people who prefer it to working from home.
I’ve seriously considered going into the office one day a week to change things up and hang out around other people. I’ve been to our office less than 20 times since folks started returning. I got COVID last summer during a group on-site and more recently had an on-site to nail down some API design and someone had COVID and didn’t know it until they returned home at the end of the week. Thankfully I dodged that bullet.
Maybe they should open a pub. Might as well do something useful with that liquor license, right? 🤔
Bubba Wallace’s No. 23 Toyota Camry will be doing a special Star Wars paint scheme for the NASCAR Cup Series season finale this weekend at Phoenix Raceway. The livery is intended to promote 23XI Racing sponsor Columbia Sportswear’s upcoming Star Wars collection, but the design is far more than just a couple of logos and movie characters slapped onto some bodywork.
If you’re a Star Wars fan or a NASCAR fan you owe it to yourself to go watch the video. Not only is Bubba Wallace’s car sporting a Star Wars theme so is Tyler Reddick’s.
Ms. Gracie wants in, with her football. 🏈
Mom is not a big fan of that.🤣 Let the battle wills begin!
First time I’ve ever had a Three Notch’d Bourbon Barrel Aged Biggie S’mores Imperial Stout. Boy-oh-boy is it delicious. 😋
I wonder if you can only get the Bourbon Barrel Aged version locally? I can’t find a link to it on their site, but here’s the regular Biggie S’mores.
Cheers! 🍻
