I contributed a single piece. Kim and Taylor have been working on this for a few days.
It’s fun watching them walk by, stop, look around for 10 minutes, drop in a few pieces and walk away.
Every once in a while they sit down together and work on it.
NFL Wild Card Weekend Picks
Saturday
Browns over Texans
I’m a Bears fan but there are other teams I semi-support. The Browns are one of those teams. Heck, I like the entirety of the AFC North. It’s like loving the entirety of the NFC North, AKA, the Black & Blue division. Both divisions have super tough teams and players. Anywho, go Browns!
Dolphins over Chiefs
This is one of my bold picks this weekend. The Chiefs, arguably, have the best player in football, but the Dolphins are up and coming and are primed for a win.
Sunday
Bills over Steelers
I’m also a closet Bills fan. I think the older I get the more I enjoy watching the game and it’s less about supporting a single team. The Bill’s have been so close for so long.
Packers over Cowboys
The Cowboys have a difficult time winning after the regular season. I don’t see why this year is any different.
Lions over Rams
The Detroit Lions look really good under the leadership of Dan Campbell. I’m hoping they can go all the way but that’s a tough row to hoe.
Monday
Buccaneers over Eagles
Another emotional pick. The Bucs have been playing really great football of late and the Eagles look a little vulnerable. But, never count out the reigning NFC Champion.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been a pretty normal week, thankfully. Work has been great. I’ve had the opportunity to have a lot of heads down time on the project which always makes me happy, and my family is good.
Now, go get that nice hot cup of coffee or tea and I hope you enjoy the links!
After much consideration, we have decided to move Platformer off of Substack. Over the next few days, the publication will migrate to a new website powered by the nonprofit, open-source publishing platform Ghost.
It’s good to know Casey took this Nazi stuff very seriously and is removing Platformer from Substack.
Once the dust settles I hope he’s able to pull all of his existing subscribers over and a whole lot more.
Thank you, Casey.
The new Iconfactory has a singular focus. We’ve been leaders in the design industry for decades and the new site puts our attention to detail, our award-winning apps, and our extensive development services at center stage. In short, we want to help you build the best apps you can, and whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, or an indie developer like us, we’re here for you. The new site explains why we’re the ones you should call on, and it does it with plain language and gorgeous examples.
Being a huge fan of The Iconfactory’s work I was excited to see the new site and it certainly delivered. It’s absolutely gorgeous and really does put what they do front and center. I hope it pays huge dividends for them!
I also noticed they featured the artwork they did for Stream’s feature in the App Store! I’m honored! ❤️
RIP? Third-party podcast app Castro appears to be dead, company goes quiet
So this outage was worse than the last one. It took down not only the service but the website as well. I really thought they’d disappeared but a couple days later they were back.
It still surprises me companies with services like this don’t have a fallback position that would allow them to spin up an environment on a different provider and point the app to it instead, without rebuilding the app of course. I dunno, maybe that’s weird or overthinking the problem, but it makes sense to me.
Better yet, Castro would be better served by eliminating the need for their own service and use existing podcast directories combined with iCloud to sync user settings and subscription lists. That would also offload checking for updated podcast episodes to the client side, but that’s not a big deal.
Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone if we use a reasonable definition of “few”.
More layoffs. Hopefully this doesn’t ripple out to smaller companies like WillowTree. Last May, for the first time in company history, we had a layoff. It’s felt strange being there ever since and I feel terribly guilty and extremely grateful I survived it. I really don’t want to see another one.
Chance Miller, Ben Lovejoy, Michael Potuck, and Arin Waichulis • 9to5Mac
iPhone from onboard Alaska Airlines incident found; survives 16,000-foot drop
Now that’s a real drop test! It amazes me I have broken two iPhones by dropping both while getting out of a car and having them fall out of my pocket. That’s like two feet off the ground.
It would’ve been cooler to find it shattered on a sidewalk or parking lot. 😂
It looks like X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has a Verified bot problem. Although X owner Elon Musk suggested that forcing users to pay for verification would help to weed out the bots (aka automated accounts) on the platform, that does not appear to be the case.
I really need to do another Space Karen post, A.K.A. The Musk Files. This dude has really screwed the pooch but it’s all his to do whatever he wants with it.
If you’re smart you’ll backup your tweets, delete them all, and abandon the platform. There are other great choices today like Mastodon or Threads. Your best bet is Mastodon + a blog so you can get free of the whims of corporations and their silos.
Lisa Boone • Los Angeles Times
Curious about building an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, in your backyard? Whether for extra income or much-needed housing for family, perhaps it’s time to investigate one of the hottest housing options in California.
An ADU is an Accessory Dwelling Unit.
It’s a label used to describe an additional place folks can live on the same property. Those garage or shed conversions you hear about can be considered ADU’s.
We had a really great detached garage at our home in California we converted into a really great living space. Our daughter and her family lived there for about a year so they could save money. We intended to use it as a She Shed for Kim but we moved to Virginia and never realized her dream.
Let’s say you’re writing a long running multi-threaded application, on Linux. Maybe it’s a database or a server of some sort. Let’s also imagine that you’re not running on some managed runtime (maybe the JVM, Go, or BEAM), but rather managing threads spawned using the clone syscall. Think of threads created in C with pthread_create, or using C++’s std::thread.
I was part of a team who wrote our own internal C++ framework — it was dubbed XSDK — for all of our teams. We had really wonderful thread support but I can’t remember how we handled interrupting them to stop them. I believe we had a Stop() method that would set a flag the threads Run() method was responsible for checking and clean itself up. After setting the flag the Stop() method would join the thread and wait for it to terminate. Anyway, our implementation used pthreads for Linux and native Windows API thread support for Windows. They both worked really well.
Explosive new audio of Roger Stone reveals the longtime Trump ally was trying to plot the assassinations of two outspoken Democratic congressmen.
I’m sorry I’m so obsessed with the orange man and the folks in his orbit. They’re all deranged bullies and must be defeated again.
VinFast Will Try And Sell Its Tiny VF3 SUV In The U.S. With 125-Mile Range For Under $20,000
I believe we need more EVs like this. Limited range and less expensive. This price is something I’m willing to pay for a new vehicle.
While I still believe we need to fund better public transportation over cars at a federal, state, and local level, the idea of an inexpensive, limited range, EV is a good start.
Isaac Arnsdorf • The Washington Post
Speaking to reporters after an appeals court hearing in which Trump’s lawyers said he should be immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, Trump claimed without evidence that he was being prosecuted because of polls showing him leading President Biden. He warned that if the charges succeed in damaging his candidacy, the result would be “bedlam.”
Our courts need to start coming down on this asshole. He’s such an authoritarian he uses his outsized influence to foment violence from his supporters.
If our court system treats him differently because he may cause violence we’ve lost our nation.
You combat a bully by punching him in the nose, hard. Let him cool his jets in prison for a while and see how it suits him.
At a minimum he should be suspended from running for President given a Colorado court rules he engaged in insurrection.
I really hope the Supreme Court interpret Section 3 or the 14 Amendment to include the President. 🤞🏼
Goose stepping moron pictured above
Videogame software provider Unity Software (U.N) will target laying off approximately 25% of its workforce, or 1,800 jobs, the company said in a regulatory filing and internal company memo on Monday.
Ahhh, Unity is back in the news. I wonder if this had anything to do with the decisions made in September of last year or it’s just “market forces”, whatever that means, that caused the need to let go of so many people.
It never occurred to me that these facts could somehow be perverted by partisanship. But three years later, we are seeing just that, as Republicans cling to the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and are poised to make Trump their 2024 nominee. And perhaps even more dangerous than the GOP ditching reality is the news media’s inability to cover Trumpism as the threat to democracy that it very much is.
The march to an authoritarian America continues, unabated. I need to step up and do what I can to stop the orange menace from winning and destroying the country as we know it.
The image above really captures what people like about a Trump Presidency. They think he’s going to make their lives wonderful by casting out all the people they hate; black and brown, Jewish or Muslim. What they don’t understand is he’s going to screw them over along with everyone else.
TMNT Robatello
While in a meeting yesterday we got on the subject of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of my New York Subway background. One of my co-workers said I was the fifth turtle.
He asked what weapon I’d carry and I said it would be an editor and a debugger.
A few minutes later he sent me this and I love it! I want to make a print of it so I can put it on my office wall.
NASCAR Engineering?
I’d love to see a website — perhaps NASCAR itself — dedicated to the engineering of engines, frames, driver cockpit, and safety, among other things.
They could have a YouTube channel and blog for it.
Here’s a case for you. A nice deep dive on power trains, which teams have full manufacturer support and who doesn’t get a darned bit of help. I’m super interested in that.
The Hendricks Engine Building team (don’t know the exact name) just celebrated their 500th win! Profile them!
Another thing I’d love to see torn down is the process of creating the Next Gen car. Did y’all know every NASCAR race car has the same frame and shares many of the same parts? That’s incredible to me! It means they’ve leveled the field somewhat, see my question about manufacturer support. Yes, some teams have more resources than others but NASCAR fields the most competitive races of any major racing series. Well, them and IndyCar. I like that they make it more about the driver.
How about some driver profiles? Thirty minutes on each driver and looks into the daily life of the crews supporting the teams. Hey, they have drivers who haul all the race equipment and cars to the tracks. Talk about an important behind the scenes job! Profile all the people!
Anywho, just some random off season thoughts.
Trump, the Orange Idiot
Advancing a sweeping interpretation of executive immunity, Donald Trump’s attorney told a federal appeals court on Tuesday that U.S. presidents could not be prosecuted for selling pardons or assassinating political rivals through SEAL Team Six
Does Trump’s lawyer understand what a stupid precedent this would set. 🤣
So, if this is true and Justices agree with the arguments laid out by Trump and his lawyers are found to be consistent with the execution of Presidential duties and immunity for the same, Joe Biden should order the CIA or FBI to execute Donald Trump and his entire family.
See how stupid that argument is? I can’t stand the Orange Man and his spawn but assassination of a political rival would plunge this country into chaos and absolutely tear us further apart. It would certainly plunge us into a new Civil War.
It would, however, achieve Trump’s goal of destroying democracy and get rid of an asshole in a single action.
But let’s not do that. Let’s beat the asshole at the polls and send him to serve some time in the clink. That is the American way.
Yes, life in the Fahrni household is a rough life full of pain and suffering. 😂
Kim has been swapping flags out quickly. The poinsettia flag lasted a week so I had to get a picture of it before I pulled it down.
Castro has gone dark again
I’ve been a Castro Podcast player user since they introduced 1.0, I couldn’t find when 1.0 shipped but it must have been over 10 years ago.
Anywho, it’s a great app and the best podcast player for my tastes. The Inbox where all podcast episodes are collected is perfect. It allows you to choose what you want to listen to and organize the list however you’d like. That’s really nice! The Inbox is noisy but the Queue, where you play them, is nice and organized. Plus the UI is simply gorgeous and well organized. In my opinion it’s the best podcast player in the market.
So, why all that intro to Castro who-haw? Well, once again, Castro has gone off the air. This is the second time in the last few months we’ve lost the backend service and the second time in the last few months Castro’s parent company — Tiny — didn’t say a thing about it.
Not only that but the Castro website has gone dark. If you try to browse to it, as of this writing, you’ll get a website not found error.
The app is still available in the App Store but it’s useless without the backend to support it.
What the heck is going on at Castro, and more importantly, Tiny to allow this to happen without informing their user base what’s going on?
Did they sell it and the new owners dropped the ball? Did they just give up on it and let it waste away to nothing through neglect? As a longtime user I’d love to know what’s going on.
Since it’s still available in the App Store is Tiny collecting subscription dollars? That’s gonna be a real mess to untangle if folks downloaded and subscribed for the year.
So many questions. Once again I wish I were a wealthy fellow so I could buy it and update it so it doesn’t need its own backend to function.
I think I need one of these. I wonder if one of my 20 oz tumbler would fit under this? 🤔
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We’re expecting a snow and sleet event this morning. As I was composing this post it started raining around 6:30AM and it’s below freezing. Here’s hoping we don’t lose power and have frozen roads later. 🥶
I hope you enjoy the links.
Colleen Long • The Associated Press
President Joe Biden will stress democracy is still a ‘sacred cause’ in a speech near Valley Forge
If TFG wins we may become an authoritarian nation. Kiss freedoms we’ve come to expect — like the horrible reversal of Roe v. Wade — to become the norm. I’d expect to see jailed political rivals and journalists. The Justice Department and Military will become law enforcement. With the law being his Orangeness.
No thank you.
Brynn Tannehill • The New Republic
The Polls Prove It: Many Republicans Love Fascism
So, yeah, fascism is the new GOP policy and Republicans across the nation love it.
That’s sickening.
Niklaus Wirth, Inventor of Pascal, Dies At 89
I never learned Pascal but know plenty of developers who made their career using it. 🪦
On Tuesday, I told subscribers that we are considering leaving the platform based on the company’s recent statement that it would not demonetize or remove openly Nazi accounts.
Bravo Casey! I wasn’t planning on linking to any Substack content but I had to break that rule for this piece. Casey is planning on doing something about Substack’s horrible position by, potentially, taking his publication and subscribers elsewhere. That’s very brave given it’s how he makes his living! ❤️
Now, if we can get other writers to follow that would be amazing.
Japan earthquake: Nearly 250 missing as hope for survivors fades
Our world has become such a mess the tragedy unfolding in Japan doesn’t even register as big news, at least that’s how it feels to me.
34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen”
Great explainer video of how the true Tetris Kill Screen was finally reached.
Also, I had no idea Tetris was still such a big deal. Silly me, of course it is! 🧱
I thought I’d be sharing photos of pintxos and more Basque lettering from Donostia-San Sebastián, and diving into our early experiences of living abroad.
My friend Ashur had planned a big adventure that didn’t quite work out as planned. It’s a worthwhile read and proves things don’t always go as planned.
David McCabe and Tripp Mickle • The New York Times
The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.
Some of the things the Justice Department are interested in seen really strange to me. Like allowing access to the Messages Service. Why should Google, or whoever else, be given the keys to access Messages backend services? Apple created and runs that service. It’s not built on a free to use, government backed, open-to-the-public utility. It’s paid for and maintained by Apple.
Now, if by access the government means Apple has to open it up as a paid service, I could see that. Perhaps Google agrees to take on some of the cost burden, based on usage, or pay Apple some huge fee so Android users have full access to Messages with a native messaging app built by Google. That wouldn’t be so bad. Another alternative is for Apple to build a Messages app for Android and sell access to the service as a monthly subscription. Hey, Apple, that means more service revenue! 😁
The whole App Store payment kerfuffle is something a lot of developers would like to see changed. I think most developers don’t want to pay Apple 15-30% of their potential revenue. That can be a lot of cheese for many Indie developers. There are some things Apple could change to help the situation, like allowing developers to actually tell users to visit their website to sign up or subscribe to their service. E.G. Amazon and Netflix cannot tell new users, through their app UI, to visit their website to get started. For a company who prides themselves on simplicity and great user experience sure do make it difficult for third-party apps to be easy to use.
Anywho, I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the Justice Department taking action against Apple and fallout from it.
So at the beginning of a new year, I’m going to remind myself that I’m too old and not paid well enough (I’m not paid at all, heh) to do another year of this kind of work. I should be making writing and reading tools work better on the web. That’s my mission.
Dave has been an innovator all his adult life. Whether it was scripting on the Mac and Windows or creating widely used technology like RSS and podcasting. Since he sold weblogs.com and left UserLand he’s continued to build writing tools of various kinds. His latest venture is FeedLand. It’s a feed reader and more. I can personally see it as a mechanism to follow and find excellent podcasts for a podcast player. Yes, it has an API that could be used for such things and it has full search capability. Bet you didn’t see that use case coming!
Anywho, I hope you get some rest, Dave, and have a wonderful 2024 making the web a better place for writers.
Keep digging!
Back in the ’00s you would download a feed reader and subscribe to feeds. This felt a lot like an early version of social media. Google Reader was killed in 2013, which was largely seen as the death of RSS. I think social media generally replaced RSS because it took far fewer technical skills to setup a Facebook account versus an RSS-enabled blog.
This is interesting because it uses Mastodon as a feed reader. That’s not a bad idea, really. It’s such a good idea to have a timeline based reader I made one! 😁
All the stuff Tim says about Facebook and other social media platforms is 100% accurate. Those platforms stood in for blogs because of their low barrier to entry. Quite honestly I’m surprised Facebook never embraced blogging as a true feature of its platform, complete with all the expected bells and whistles, and that includes RSS and posts that don’t require a Facebook login to read them.
Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what’s getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we’re instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse.
There was a time, not that long ago, folks said things like “RSS is dead” or asked “Is RSS dead?” First off, it’s just a technology, so it can’t actually die. Second, its web fabric and has been since its inception. It’s boring stuff — this is not a dig or insult, it’s a compliment. It’s as boring as HTML or CSS. I’d imagine it’s been used for all sorts of stuff beyond blogs over its history and it’ll probably be around for as long as we have a web to browse.
Sure social media, or microblogging, took center stage for a while. My own blogging slowed for a long period of time because I started posting little blurbs of text to Twitter instead of my blog.
Now I do that with a combination of Mastodon and Micro.blog. Short posts go to Mastodon and Micro.blog and long posts, like this one, go to my blog with a link on many services including Mastodon , Micro.blog, Blue Sky, and Tumblr.
My blog is at the center. It’s my content, I own it.
Here’s an uncomfortable question: when do I stop blogging?
I always find this question odd. I figure I’ll stop when, or if, I just stop one day. I suppose folks who do it professionally have to think about stuff like this, especially if they have subscribers and/or advertisers.
Maybe when the day comes that you’d like to stop doing it for a living you just let folks know you’re going to blog about whatever you’d like and do it for fun?
I’ve been blogging since February 2001 and still love it.
A Handsome Aluminum and Ultem Smartphone Case
I want one of these. Guess I need to buy an iPhone 14 or 15 Pro? Having an updated iPhone would also open the door to a whole lot of cases I love at Cotton Bureau. 😃
Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, Ben Lovejoy, and Ben Schoon • 9to5Mac
The iPhone is the device that pushed the mobile industry away from physical keyboards, but nothing can truly replace that tactile experience. Launching next month, “Clicks” aims to add a physical keyboard to your iPhone with support for keyboard shortcuts and backlighting too.
In 2013 Ryan Seacrest was part of an effort to bring a physical keyboard to the iPhone. It was called Typo and I never heard much about it beyond the initial announcement. I could’ve sworn it was earlier than 2013, but my memory sometimes fails me.
Anyway, I hope these folks are wildly successful. Good luck y’all!
Richard Devine • Windows Central
The best holiday gift was Mac losing out to Windows, at least according to these stats
It’s obvious some Windows users and pundits still have an inferiority complex when it comes to the Mac. It’s surprising.
I’m an old, long time, Windows developer and I owe a lot to the platform. I spent around 20 years writing code for Windows and I still believe it to be an amazing platform for users and developers. But I switched to the Mac full time in 2006 and have grown to enjoy it every bit as much as Windows.
It’s perfectly fine to love using a different operating system or prefer coding for one over the other. Let people have fun and enjoy what they love doing. ❤️
Here’s hoping 2024 isn’t a complete shit show. 🤣
According to my weather app it’s snowing outside. I can tell you by actual experience outside this morning that it is not snowing. We’re getting just enough sleet to make everything slippery. Yuck! 🧊
A Substacker Replies
I’m thinking about what I am doing, Rob, as I said expressly in the post you just commented on.
Sorry, did I miss that I am contractually obligated to inform you during a particular time period?
Ken is a valued read and is a very funny guy. The above is a reply to me asking him when he’s leaving Substack and it’s nice to know he’s working on it.
I don’t plan on posting links to the platform any longer, as if my two readers will make a difference. 😄
Like I said in a prior post — or possibly Mastodon — this time period is going to be tough on authors as they sort through their options.
Unfortunately some of my favorite writers remain on the platform. I hope they all eventually decide to leave. 🤞🏼
Ms. Gracie got a new bed big enough for Taylor to crawl into! 😂
Poor Gracie just hit the 11 month old mark and she has hip dysplasia. So we got her this nice bed in the hope it’ll make her more comfortable. 🤞🏼
Custom Coffee Bag ☕️
Who needs a custom Exeter Coffee Company coffee bag? 🤣
I decided to grind the 1lb bag of ExCoCo Taylor bought me on her trip back home. I didn’t have a good bag for the grind so I dumped the remaining Seattle’s Best 6th Avenue into a second bag of 6th Avenue and used it.
I had to make a custom label from so I’d know what it was. 😃
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
So ends my week of relaxation. In the past I’d start becoming angry about how quickly my time off flew by. Not this week. I made the most of each day with some lazing about thrown in.
I managed to get some time to work on Stream for Mac and do a bunch of things around the house I’d put off for far too long. Today I plan on cleaning up Kim’s car and working on my dumpster bike. But I’m open to change.
Anywho, my coffee is ready. I hope you enjoy the links.
Nikki Haley got asked a straightforward question: “What was the cause of the United States’ Civil War?” She staggers back, stalls for time, and finally coughs up, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run.
This is one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever seen. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows the Civil War was fought over slavery. So, either Nikki Haley is a racist piece of crap or extremely stupid. I don’t think she’s stupid.
This was the easiest of softball questions you could give a Presidential candidate and she failed miserably, that alone should disqualify her from holding office in any federal, state, or local government.
Of course she’s competing with the biggest asshole of all for the GOP nomination. Good luck with that, Ms. Haley.
Maybe this was part of her audition for the Vice Presidency? Gotta show the Orange Man how racist she really is to get the job. 🤬
Meanwhile, a world-class trail runner named Emilia kills herself after a Covid infection leaves her with an unstable heart. Around the world, smart talented young men and women are losing their careers after Covid ravages their organs, their brains, their immune systems.
COVID is still around and still wreaking havoc on folks.
I still need to get my booster, you should too. 💉
Over 15 years ago, GitHub started as a Ruby on Rails application with a single MySQL database. Since then, GitHub has evolved its MySQL architecture to meet the scaling and resiliency needs of the platform—including building for high availability, implementing testing automation, and partitioning the data.
It’s wild to see how big services can become. GitHub — the company that centralized a decentralized version control system — has over 1,200 MySQL databases. That’s a metric crap ton.
It also seems strange given Microsoft has their own SQL Server offering continues to use MySQL, owned by Oracle. 🥴
Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump, used an artificial intelligence program to generate bogus legal citations in his motion for early termination of his supervised release.
The moral of the story is don’t believe everything a LLM gives you. You still need to verify the answer.
Scientists in California shooting nearly 200 lasers at a cylinder holding a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn have taken another step in the quest for fusion energy, which, if mastered, could provide the world with a near-limitless source of clean power.
Will this pan out? If we’ve ever needed it now is the time. At the rate the climate is changing a team of scientists will emerge from their labs to announce to the world they’ve done it only to find the world on fire.
Inside Apple’s Massive Push to Transform the Mac Into a Gaming Paradise
But will AAA games come around and make the commitment to the platform? Without developers it’s an instant failure.
Can you add artificial intelligence to the hydraulics?
This is a link to a comment on a post — at least I think it is? Regardless it’s a funny read. If you only follow one link make it this one. AI is taking over all the things even if it can’t.
Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th.
I’m kind of surprised they don’t just bake this into Amazon Prime pricing.
With over 1,600 total entries on hand for the Tulsa Shootout this week, there is bound to be some NASCAR connections to the biggest Micro Sprint event in the country.
I’m not sure how many folks not into NASCAR would know that drivers often compete in multiple different types of races throughout the year.
Sprint Cars seem to be a real favorite and winning a Golden Driller is still a highly sought after prize. Even for highly talented NASCAR drivers.
Stream for Mac: Work Note, Menus and More
Yesterday was the second day this week I managed to work on Stream for Mac.
Some things are starting to gel but as is typical I figure something out and run head long into the next thing I need to figure out. It’s all good stuff though! I’m definitely not complaining as I’m learning a lot and at least I should have a solid — very basic — understanding about the assembly of a Mac App when I’m done with this release.
Yesterday I managed to get the File Menu items hooked up and I did a very basic implementation of Import Subscriptions which allows you to import an OPML file of all of your feeds. For the first test the file name was hard wired to a file in the Downloads folder. There was my first challenge. I had to learn a little bit about the sandbox and setup the app to allow for read only access to Downloads, then ask the user for permission to access it. Once that worked I was able to start the import process by stubbing out some of my protocols used by the process and just allowing it to run in the background. It ran to completion and I was able to add an additional 206 feeds to my list. It’s a great way to populate the app!
Next Task
I’m trying to instantiate a class early on in the AppDelegate and I want to pass it down through all the various layers ultimately to the Feed View Controller. That’s where I got stuck once again. That’s ok. I’m learning and I may be doing it wrong. Right now the data I’d like to instantiate at startup is instantiated in the Feed View Controller. The reason I’d like to get it in the App Delegate is I’d like access to it when a menu item is selected. Maybe this is just flat out the wrong way to look at it? I don’t know yet, I’m still trying to decide what’s best.
First off I’m using Storyboards, which is the way the project was created in 2021 when I made the target. So, given that I’d like to programmatically load the WindowController, Window, and finally ViewController myself so I can pass this data all the way down to the ViewController. On iOS it’s a very straight forward process. Load the ViewController and specify the init method you’d like to use and provide parameters. Done, easy.
On the Mac there are two extra layers to go through which has me questioning my whole reason for existence. It seems really dumb to pass through two extra layers just to get to the ViewController. Perhaps I do need to rethink my entire existence? Perhaps I just need to rethink the structure of my existing classes to better accommodate the Mac?
Why, Rob, Why?
I’m doing this because the thing that kicks off the refresh process also takes an instance of a protocol that’s used to update progress of the refresh. It’s what drives the progress indicator you see in the navigation bar of the iOS app.
When someone selects the Refresh menu item it’s handled in the App Delegate. That is removed from the UI where the update needs to happen by two layers; Window Controller and Window.
On iOS the UI interaction is handled by the View Controller which kicks the process off right at that layer and provides an implementation of the progress protocol I’ve defined so the UI updates properly. If I didn’t want to update the UI the way I do it would be much easier. 😃 Perhaps the Mac App should do something different, like display a spinner and disable the refresh buttons and menu item until the process is complete?
Anyway. This is leading me to rethink a lot of my iOS strategies from years and years gone by to better suit the Mac and iOS platforms.
These notes are also really good for me. They help me think through the process as I’m typing and also lead me to say “Rob, you’re doing it wrong” a lot, which is also helpful to my learning process.
Overall I’ve had frustrating moments and really great ah-ha moments and I must say that the Mac and iOS communities have been so supportive of me and my stupid questions.
The Core Intuition Slack has been amazing! Thanks y’all, you know who you are! 🙏🏼
Had to get a picture of Father Christmas before he came down!
Whoops, it looks like my Mastodon instance has gone down. DOH!
Update: that didn’t last long! 🤣
Stream for Mac: Work Note
I managed to work on Stream for Mac for a little while yesterday. I got a bit confused about how menus operate on the Mac — from a developer standpoint. I’m an old Windows developer of 20 years turned iOS developer in 2009 and now exploring the Mac and AppKit (yeah, I know, it’s old and busted now.) I got hung up on who “owns” the menu in a Mac App. I’d never had to think about it before, now I have a better understanding of how the Mac and first responder work.
I was kind of beating my head against the concept until our internet connection decided to stop working and I was kind of forced to walk away for a bit. That was intimately the key to figuring it out. I asked some questions on the Core Intuition Slack, using my phone, got some great answers to my noob questions, and read about menus and first responder in a book I have available in Kindle. The book I used was Programming Swift! Mac Apps 1 Swift 3 Edition by Nick Smith. I jumped to Chapter 8 Menus, Toolbars, and First Responder and that did the trick. I’m hoping I’ll be able to carve out some time today to put my newfound knowledge to use. 🤞🏼
I have other chores to take care of first. Hopefully they don’t take too long. Heh, they always take too long. 😂
The Nazi Bar on the Corner
Eventually, the Substack founders had to respond. They couldn’t stare off into the distance like Best did during the Nilay Patel interview in April. So another founder, Hamish McKenzie, finally published a Note saying “yes, we allow Nazis and we’re not going to stop.” Of course, as is too often the case on these things, he tried to couch it as a principled stance
- Robert Reich
- Michael Moore
- Steven Beschloss
- Virginia Heffernan
- Mary L. Trump
- Joyce Vance
- Michael McFaul
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Platformer (Casey Newton)
This is a list of folks I’ve been following on Substack. I currently pay for one of those subscriptions and I will no longer be doing that.
There are a lot of wonderful writers and thinkers in that list and I’m shocked they’ve chosen to hang out in the Nazi bar. It’s disgusting.
I’m sure there are many other great writers I don’t know about using Substack but it’s time to move on people. Start your own blog and offer a newsletter from there. Want to monetize it? Hanging out with Nazis to get a paycheck is still hanging out with Nazis and it means you support them.
Try WordPress, Ghost, or Buttondown.
There are others
M1 Mac Runners with Christina Warren
I’m not a backend developer but I do find the care and feeding of services fascinating.
In this video Christina Warren takes us into a GitHub lab — complete with lab coat — to discuss GitHub’s M1 Mac runners.
I’ve wondered how these machines were setup. I’d imagined a bunch of Mac Mini’s turned vertically in a custom rack, but that’s not at all what GitHub does! They disassemble the Mini, pull the parts and pieces out, and put them into a custom sled that allows them to slide right into a rack. It’s extremely cool and now I want a rack of them in my home. 🤣
This did raise some questions however.
What do they do with the shells after they gut the Mini? Do they have a deal with Apple to return them? Do they fill them with PC parts and use them as desktop computers?
Why are they using M1s? Why not M2s? Is it because it took time to build out the new sled and master gutting the Mini without destroying parts? Is it because the M1 is so much better than the old x86 boxes that they decided to get M1s at a discount?
How many total Mac runners do the currently have at GitHub, including x86 based boxes? Were they all gutted and configured to work on a sled like these new M1 versions?
Is the process of building out a sled and rack of these documented anywhere?
Does Apple have an opinion on this? Does Apple have a similar setup for their Xcode Cloud service or do they just have a room full of Mac Mini’s somewhere?
Does GitHub have more Macs on their public facing network than Apple? I’d imagine Apple is using cheap PC boxes running Linux for any service they’re not already running on AWS or Azure.
Is Apple, perhaps, running their Xcode Cloud service inside GitHubs infrastructure?
So many questions.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I don’t know about y’all but I’ve taken the week between Christmas and New Year off. I do it every year and it’s a nice way to wrap up the year. I’m never sure what I’m going to do during my time off but I do hope to work on Stream a little bit and with any luck we’ll have the grandkids over at least one more time. They’re here now and we’re having a great time together.
More than 200 Substack authors asked the platform to explain why it’s “platforming and monetizing Nazis,” and now they have an answer straight from co-founder Hamish McKenzie
I follow a number of writers I really like on Substack and I have a terrible feeling they’ll all continue to use the Nazi loving platform because of the money they generate.
I will no longer be supporting any of those authors or linking to any of their work until they abandon the platform.
There are options. You could move to Buttondown, use WordPress, or roll your own like Ben Thompson did for Stratechery.
I know that last option is not for the faint of heart but Ben has managed a successful, paid, newsletter for over a decade.
WordPress is still a bit of work, but much easier than roll-your-own. You can pay WordPress to host your site.
Buttondown is not a VC backed venture — that supports Nazi’s — so it takes money to keep it going. Yes, Buttondown is a paid service.
I’d imagine there are other options. Look around and get away from Substack as quickly as humanly possible.
Figma and Adobe have reached a joint decision to end our pending acquisition. It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.
Time certainly does fly! I had no idea it had been 18-months since the proposed acquisition began.
I know there were equal parts excitement and dread around the deal but know all folks need to worry about is Figma surviving as a company.
Will Adobe blow the dust off of XD and get back to work or has that season passed? I was on the XD beta and thought it was a really great piece of software. It was a shame to see it go.
If you want an overview of how things are in Lahaina four months after the fire, check out Jesse Wald’s video. TL;DR: The EPA just completed the hazardous materials removal project and now the main debris removal will start and take about a year.
Devastating. That’s the only word I can use to describe the Lahaina fire. As Bill notes it’s going to take years for things to get back to “normal.” As if normal can ever really return to these poor people. 💔
Chance Miller and Ben Lovejoy • 9to5Mac
The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.
This is interesting news. It makes me wonder how much Apple will eventually pay to make the problem go away or will they buy the company?
Andrew Hutchinson • Social Media Today
As Threads continues to gain momentum, especially among journalists, a next key step will be the development of an API, which will then enable direct publishing to Threads, as well as scheduling, third-party analytics, and more.
I can kind of see why they’re creating this input only API. They want to support news organizations and the like who schedule posts or have them setup as a part of their publishing workflow.
But Threads could do it by setting up a Weblogs Ping server and accept RSS feeds!
Weblogs ping is a way to tell a server ”Hey, I have an update” and the server goes out and collects your RSS feed. This would be really great for batch updates. Threads could even define their own namespace extension to RSS if they need additional data. Problem solved!
David McCabe and Nico Grant • The New York Times
Google said on Monday that it would allow developers on its Play app store to offer direct payment options to users and would pay $700 million to settle an antitrust suit brought by state attorneys general, in the company’s latest move to navigate increased regulatory scrutiny of its power.
It was kind of strange to see Google lose and Apple win their respective cases. Google chose a jury trial which seems to have lead to their loss.
No matter. It now makes Apple the only company that requires using their store and payment system. Will this help a Government case if they ever push on Apple to allow third party stores and payment systems?
Laine Campbell • Facebook Engineering
While the app’s production launch had been under consideration for some time, the business finally made the decision and informed the infrastructure teams to prepare for its launch with only two days’ advance notice. The decision was made with full confidence that Meta’s infrastructure teams can deliver based on their past track record and the maturity of the infrastructure. Despite the daunting challenges with minimal lead time, the infrastructure teams supported the app’s rapid growth exceptionally well.
This is an incredible engineering feat. I’m not a fan of Facebook but they do have amazing engineers. If you’re into what it takes to power millions of users the world over go read the piece. It’s really good.
Ukraine’s military intelligence didn’t reveal what forces fighting on Ukraine’s side were responsible for the attack, hinting that it could have been one of the Russian battalions employed by Kyiv.
It’s heartwarming to see Russians push back against Putin. We 100% need to continue our support of Ukraine. Putin and his authoritarian regime cannot be allowed to take another inch of Ukrainian soil. If Ukraine falls, who’s next?
Since RSS is an open web thing that brings you stuff people write, and ActivityPub is also an open web thing that brings you stuff people write, it’s an obvious good idea to do both in the same app. Totally.
I thought about supporting ActivityPub — Mastodon in particular — as a first class citizen in Stream but the truth of the matter is it’s already a first class citizen because Mastodon supports RSS natively and it’s really good! Case closed.
The Privilege of Justice Thomas
After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.
I read this piece and was kind of disgusted by the privilege of political power. Here’s a man who chose to take a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land — a job he can quit at any time — only to bitch and moan about his “low pay.” Let me get this straight, a $173,000 salary in the early 2000’s wasn’t enough? Hell, it 2023, I have a high paying job and I don’t make that much.
Let’s take the typical GOP line here. If you don’t like your job or the pay go find another job. It’s that simple.
Since I make less than Judge Thomas does I’d like to let Harlan Crow I’m available to be bought. I don’t need lavish vacations with you. Just shoot me over, let’s say, $5,000,000.00 and I’ll become a Republican. Not a MAGA asshole, just a “normal” Republican.
Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
The stench off privilege is so strong I can smell it in Charlottesville.
George Priest, a Yale Law School professor who has vacationed with Thomas and Crow, told ProPublica he believes Crow’s generosity was not intended to influence Thomas’ views but rather to make his life more comfortable.
Like I said, I’m not too proud to be kept by a billionaire. Since his support of Thomas is simply to “make his life more comfortable” I think I deserve a piece of that action. I won’t do anything for Crow either, except happily take his money and do what I want. I already sound like a Republican!
Sorry for the rant. I hear stuff like this, the privilege of the powerful, and it makes me sick to my stomach. I’m fine but there are so many people out there struggling to get by. People who want to work, people who work their asses off, and are one emergency away from being homeless or not getting enough to eat.
Meanwhile a Supreme Court Justice bitches about his rough life.
Give me a break.
Apple Cloud Computing, please
As an Apple developer I feel like there’s a service missing from their offerings. Namely something like AWS or Azure, but for indie devs.
Perhaps that is too small a service or too costly to manage for Apple’s tastes? Remember, Tim Cook loves him a big pile of money.
What I’d like is the ability to host services with Apple. Something like the old Parse prior to Facebook acquiring them. That would allow us small folks to spin up a server without having to manage it.
Now, knowing Apple, this would cost a hojillion dollars to use, which wouldn’t work for an indie like myself, but it would be nice to see them give us an option like that.
Ideal
The ideal service would be a nice restful interface with a dashboard for creation and management of models I could fetch with a simple command per user. I know, I know, it sounds like a slightly enhanced CloudKit at this point which is true, but it would be nice to add the ability to get to these service from any code, be it web or Android or Windows, whatever, and let me save data that is not per user data. Yes, I want a true hosting solution I can spin up with a simple to use web interface and I’d prefer not to have to pay additionally for it.
Now, imagine if small developers who have to pay large sums of money to keep their services running could use a great Apple provider service? I’m looking at you, Castro.
Having a really great option for small to medium indie shops could make the App Store even better.
Hey, a fella can dream, right? 😃