My new Stream phone cases are live on Cotton Bureau! YAY! š„³
Now we wait on the t-shirts! This is so exciting!
As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally.
Now, more than ever, is time to start your own weblog. Zuck and Musk donāt own the internet. Itās open to all.
Dump Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Space Karenās X.
Go social on the open web with the likes of Micro.blog, Mastodon, or Bluesky.
A tail of two dogs
See what I did with that title? Iām here all week.
Itās been snowing overnight and when we got up this morning Kolby was like āOh, itās that cold white stuff. Guess Iād better do my business so I can go back inside.ā Thatās just what he did. No sniffing about. Get āer done.
Gracie on the other hand was like āOMG! I love this stuff itās cold and fluffy and I should lick it! Now I should lose my brain and do zoomies around the yard for the next five minutes!ā
Keep in mind that Ms. Gracie is a 110 pound Great Pyrenees. She doesnāt usually move that much or that fast.
She did her zoomies, tried to coax brother into playing, then decided to take a break in the snow by lying down.
She loves it so much. š¶
Now theyāre both passed out in the floor. Busy morning.
Snow has started falling. Itās supposed to go all night. Guess weāll see. š„¶
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Iām back and feeling much better! This week was a mix of recovering from being sick and trying to ease back into work. Next week we kick off the next phase of the project Iām working on and Iām looking forward to seeing what weāre gonna do.
Coffee is in and links are linked. Enjoy! š
John Brayton ā¢ Golden Hill Software
2024 was a big year for Unread. The highlight of the year was the release of Unread for Mac. I first announced that I would be working on a Mac version at the start of 2023. I released the first public beta at the start of 2024. I released the final version in July 2024.
A big congratulations to my friend, John! I had the fortune to be a beta site for Unread and give John a little feedback over the course of it.
The Mac version of Unread is 100% a āMac assed Mac app.ā Itās beautifully designed, fast, and feature rich.
Unreadās biggest unlock is its syncing service. No need to purchase a third party service for sync, itās built right in.
Highly recommended.šš¼
Iāve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversationsāand some differencesāabout cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time Iāve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
This is absolutely pathetic. I would really love to see Bezos sell the Washington Post. The billionaire class in America needs to be dismantled. Theyāre not helping the country, at all. Theyāre just as bad, if not worse, than Russian Oligarchs. I never thought Iād see our country come to this in my lifetime. Pathetic.
Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration
Boy-oh-boy CEOās are lining up to kiss Marmalade Messiahās ass.
I really, really, hate this. Cook is an openly gay man and Orange dude wants the LGBTQ+ community to disappear. Heās supporting a man, and a movement, that hates him with everything in their being.
All these CEOās are playing right into the authoritarian playbook. Theyāre obeying in advance. Not good for our nation.
If someone signs up for Micro.one and they later need the extra advanced features and cross-posting, they can upgrade from the $1 Micro.one subscription to the standard $5 Micro.blog subscription. Itās a natural upgrade without gimmicks.
This is an amazing deal for a blogging/micro blogging service.
Congratulations Manton and team!
The more I learn about Lua’s design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It’s very rare to see software that does so much with so little code.
Lua is an extremely cool little language. You can run it standalone and you can embed it into your application. When I was at Pelco one of our developers wrote a test harness for our media pipeline that embedded Lua and he used it to drive integration tests. It was an excellent use of Lua. Iām a fan.
Corey LaJoie not expected to return to Rick Ware Racing
This is a real bummer but not unexpected. LaJoie had a rough year and was out performed by his Rookie of the Year teammate, Carson Hocevar.
I could tell there was something off with Corey on his podcast, Stacking Pennies. There were times when he came across angry or down.
I like Corey LaJoie and I hope he finds a seat for the 2025 Cup, Xfinity, or Truck Series. He certainly is an underdog whoās never been in good equipment until the 2024 season.
Remy Tumin ā¢ The New York Times
The end of the year may be associated with the holiday season for many, but Daniel Stern refers to it as something else: the āHome Aloneā time.
Daniel Sternās Marv in Home Alone is unforgettable. My favorite scene with him is the tarantula scene. That scream was surprising and way higher pitched than I expected.
Itās neat to see talented folks like him go off and explore other things. Iād love to have one of his sculptures!
Naoko Nishimoto vowed to give up driving when she reached the age of 80. That meant finding a new home for her treasured Mazda RX-7, which she ordered new 25 years ago.
Just look at that RX-7. Itās pristine. Itās also really cool of Mazda to buy it back.
Yesterday, the team at Lux announced that they are working on the next major release of their pro camera app, Halide, which will be dubbed Halide Mark III. The next iteration of Halide, which Lux hopes to release in 2025 will focus on three areas
This tiny team has done some incredible work over the years and done stuff with photos I had no idea was possible. Last I checked it was three folks doing all this incredible work! Talented Indie shops like this are so impressive and I hope theyāre able to operate for as long as they want.
Liz Pelly ā¢ Harper’s Magazine
Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musiciansāvariously called ghost or fake artistsāpresumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.
This is kind of disgusting and deceiving. If Spotify wants to do this, fine, do it. But at least have the guts to tell your listeners it was created by Spotify and donāt play this dishonest game of making up artists.
Old cars with modern drivetrains are often terrible. People go too far in their restomods, turning classic muscle cars into the automotive equivalent of those LED-ridden black leather couches.
I love the idea of converting a traditional gas powered vehicle to all electric. I wish I had a bunch of money that would allow me to quit my job so I could experiment with all kinds of things. Something Iāve always wanted to do is get a beater car, rebuild the motor, transmission, and rear differential (the drive train) to create a mechanically sound, aesthetically unmodified car.
Why not make it an EV? š
The Delta gaming emulator is now providing a link to sign up for Patreon-exclusive membership perks directly within the iOS app in Appleās US App Store.
How in the world are they getting away with this?
I have to believe if all iOS Developer knew they could get away with this theyād choose to do their own payment system to avoid the 15-30% they have to give Apple. Seems a no brainer business decision. As it is the 15-30% is the cost of doing business with Apple.
Jonathan M. Gitlin ā¢ Ars Technica
Honda and Nissan to merge, Honda will take the lead
This was a big surprise when I read it. It will be very interesting to see their car lineup once theyāve settled down.
I hope they keep Nissan trucks, theyāre really nice.
Weāre getting prepared for a deep freeze here in Charlottesville. Weāll see if the projected 10in of snow falls on Monday or if, as often happens, it completely changes and we get rain instead of snow. š
It is supposed to get pretty darned frigid.
Happy New Year yāall! š„³
Hereās hoping 2025 is really boring for all of us!
Definitely not Immortal
I donāt believe in making resolutions for the new year. If something needs doing, just do it.
Iām just starting to feel better after a few days fighting off a stomach bug. Thereās an alarming trend with my health. When someone in my family gets sick I seem to be the only other member of the family to get sick.
Friday afternoon I started feeling uncomfortable. By Friday evening my granddaughter and I were both pretty darned sick. She was worse off than me. She stopped vomiting around 11PM and fell asleep. Poor baby was wiped out.
I puked my first and only time at 2AM (my issue has been the other end!) Last time I checked the time it was 2:45AM. I fell to sleep sometime after that.
She woke up Saturday feeling much better. I, on the other hand, slept most of the day and stayed in bed as much as my gut would allow.
The dogs woke me up Sunday morning. I was still off. I felt detached from my body. When Iād touch things they didnāt feel real. No fever, but itās often how I feel with a fever. I managed to eat dinner. My first meal since the slice of pizza I had Friday evening before symptoms really kicked in.
Here we are, Monday morning. My gut is still gurgling and feels fragile. I did have coffee. I was hoping it wasnāt a mistake and so far, so good. No vomiting since Friday but still having issues out the other end. Iāve managed to keep down water and Gatorade just fine. Today Iām hoping some additional solids will help get me over the hump.
All of this to say Iām thinking about my mortality more than ever before. My body is breaking down and Iāve not helped myself by becoming morbidly obese ā according to the doctor based on my weight. I get tired easily and my body flat out hurts most of the time. I sit on my butt way too much. Iāve become that lazy man I said Iād never become and itās going to kill me. And still, after all that, I lack the motivation to do anything about it.
Whatās wrong with me?
To be totally honest I canāt die anytime soon. Iāve predicted my own demise at 80 years old if things donāt change. I have a wife, kids, and grandkids who still depend on me. Couple that with being an idiot when it comes to financial planning and Iāve setup the perfect American nightmare scenario. Aging husband, retired wife, two kids who struggle in our economy. We are one medical disaster away from all of us living on the streets. Thatās the most American thing I can think of.
One of my biggest issues is having a positive attitude about things working out. Iāve always felt like weāll be ok and find our way through. To date, weāve managed to just that.
Iād imagine this is a fairly average tale as folks age and realize they are indeed mortal and they did a horrible job of financial planning. Also, I believe, very American. š
Kim, my amazing wife, is right. I need to make big changes. I used to be active and loved going to the gym. I need to exercise more. I also need to stop abusing my body with crummy food. I love fast food. There, I admitted it. I love to eat. Itās a terrible attribute. Why couldnāt I be āaddictedā to math the way I am to food? Genetics has something to do with it, Iām sure. I developed a strange attitude after almost dying at the age of 17. My attitude was: If I want it, Iām getting it. A second piece of pie? Yes, please. Yep, another brilliant strategy.
If anyone knows of a study thatās been conducted on peopleās relationship with food please point me to it. I obviously have a bad one. Itās like being a crack addict or alcoholic. Itās like staying in that abusive relationship because youāre in love. Iām sorry if that comparison offends anyone. I have no other way to make my point. I have a real problem.
I know, I know, what a strange thing to share.
This is just me with a quiet morning to myself, coming off being sick, with a slightly addled brain (still feeling detached) from the ordeal. š¤Ŗ
A very Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! š š¼
Hearing folks calling a YouTube video a Podcast is weird.
Being a blogger at the time the Podcast was created forms my opinion about what a podcast is. I believe itās all about audio. Iād love to know how Dave Winer and Adam Curry define it.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Iām running a bit behind again this week. Kim, Taylor, and I went out for breakfast this morning at TipTop and I had their excellent biscuits and gravy. Something else of not at TipTop is their coffee. Itās excellent! So, if youāre ever in Charlottesville head over to the Pantops area and visit TipTop Restaurant for breakfast. Hopefully you like it as much as I do.
This week was my last week of work until the new year. My brain has been checked out all week, thinking ahead to Christmas and time with our girls, grandkids, and son-in-law.
Oh, we also had a little snow flurry this morning. It was a single cloud overhead and once it passed no other cloud has dropped snow. We saw cars in Charlettesville with snow on them. Not much. Just the tiniest dusting. Iād love to have an inch or two for Christmas, but I we donāt have any in the forecast. Just cold, which is also fine.
I hope you enjoy the links!
Matt Mullenweg ā¢ WordPress.org
I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engineās legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.
This feud is getting more and more dramatic by the day. Iām surprised it hasnāt been forked a bunch of times and taken in new directions.
What happens to WP Engine if the community fragments and different versions of WordPress evolve? Shouldnāt WP Engine fork it and do with it what they please? Yes, of course. Will they? I doubt it. Theyāre owned by a private equity firm, Silver Lake. All they want to do is bleed the company dry, sell it off for parts, and move on to the next company.
We, the WordPress community, need to decide if weāre ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is āDemocratizing publishingā, weāve been very low on exactly that: democracy.
This is probably what the WP Engine folks should be doing and I hope more of the community gets behind this effort.
Some people think that wouldnāt go far enough, that WordPress would be better off with someone new taking over Mattās role across the project. Iām not convinced. WordPress and Automattic didnāt accidentally become successful. They are successful in large part because of Matt and the teams he built.
The reason Iām linking to Manton is because I think heās become a leading voice for the open web, blogging, and micro formats. Heās built a nice business on top of open web technologies and fully embraced micro blogging formats like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Nostr. Heās also opened up Micro.blog to post to Tumblr and WordPress blogs. Basically Micro.blog has become the center point of blogging for me. I write on Micro.blog and it gets published to these other locations automagically. Of course you, the blogger, have to configure Micro.blog to publish to these other places but thatās easy. Once youāve done it, it just magically happens when you post. Easy peasy.
So, if youāre looking for a pure blogging platform give Micro.blog a look. Itās well worth the $5 per month and you can start with a free account just to give it a try.
When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage ā when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile ā that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:
Once of the promises of Bluesky was that by creating the AT Proto protocol the service wouldnāt exist as a single entity, there would be many implementation that all tied together. So far everything is centralized under Bluesky.
I havenāt fully wrapped my brain around what AT Proto really means for the open web. Iād asked what it would take to spin up an instance on Bluesky and I learned there arenāt really other instances but you could host your own data anywhere as long as you did an implementation of a specific portion of the protocol. I have so much to learn.
Today, Iām launching Forked, a new approach to working with shared data in Swift. And it has actually worked out better than I expected. I wasnāt even sure it would be possible to build, but with the new Swift macros, I was able to come up with a minimal API that seems to work great. Iām really looking forward to dog fooding it.
This looks extremely interesting to me. Iāve had requests from folks to provide a mechanism to sync Stream feeds across multiple devices. Forked may provide that means. I will be putting some time aside to give Forked a try. Hopefully itāll do what I need to make syncing work across devices without the need to build a backend service, which could be terribly expensive and time consuming to operate.
McLeod and co-owner Matt Tifft sold the charter to Spire Motorsports. In doing so, the organization chose to go from a full-time operation to competing on a limited basis, primarily on superspeedways. McLeod made five starts in 2024 (plus two for Carl Longās team) in the Cup Series and four (plus one for Long) in the Xfinity Series.
Iāve written before about how much I like B.J. McLeod. Heās the little guy, not some giant team with backing from a major manufacturer like Chevy, Ford, or Toyota. Itās surprising a little team like his can put a fairly competitive car on the track. Heās especially good at what are considered Super Speedways like Daytona and Talledega.
He failed to qualify for the 2024 Daytona 500 so I hope he manages to make it in 2025. I would love to see him pull off a miracle win at one of these Super Speedways. Sure, itās not likely, but of all track types Super Speedways are very unpredictable because of pack racing. These cars are so equally configured they typically run within a few tenths of a second of each other.
Iām looking forward to the opening of the 2025 NASCAR season in February.
Reminder for anyone who doesn’t know: I’m writing almost every day on my Substack
I like reading Paul Krugman but heās decided to host his writing on Nazi loving Substack and that is a bummer. I have a large list of writers I wish would move to a better service (if they must have a service.)
It would be just as easy to host on WordPress.com or even Micro.blog. Iām not sure if Mr. Krugman plans on having a subscription plan but Substack is a terrible choice for it and his wonderful writing.
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote in a New York Times op-ed Friday that the for-profit U.S. healthcare system “does not work as well as it should” and that “no one would design a system like the one we have,” admissions that came as his industry faced a torrent of public anger following the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive.
Medicare for all with the United States Government as the single payor. Yeah, sure, weād need to pay taxes to make it work but medicine operated as a for profit business is a huge mistake, not to mention the disaster that is medical insurance.
Christopher Harper ā¢ Tomās Hardware
A recently posted photograph of old-school Commodore 64s, which debuted 42 years ago, in use as registers at a modern bakery has attracted a lot of attention. As further sleuthed by commenters, this bakery was identified as the Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg, Indiana, and the last publicly posted picture of the Commodore 64 register was in 2021. As such, we called the shop, and they verified that the registers are still in use. At the time of writing, the establishment in question has 488 Google reviews with an average 4.7-star rating and 202 Facebook reviews with an average 4.5-star ratingā and, if some reviews mentioning the C64 are any indication, it even seems to be busier than usual, likely encouraged by the spreading word of this retro tech curiosity.
How cool is this? My brother had a Commodore 64 and he had a ton of fun playing games on it. He also wrote a program to generate D & D characters, as one did in the early 80ās.
I think about old tech like this from time to time and wonder if it could be repurposed to very specific tasks. The answer is obviously a resounding YES!
I wonder how they keep the equipment from getting all sticky and covered in flour?
Orange Man has lost his ever loving mind.
What do you want to do? Invade Canada? I bet half of the US would help our lovely neighbors to the north. šØš¦
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Welcome to a Sunday morning edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. š My youngest daughter and I went to breakfast ā TipTop Restaurant ā and did a bit of Christmas shopping yesterday. Itās something we do every year. You might say itās tradition. š
š¼
Todays forecast calls for a little snow. āļø I hope it happens.
My coffee is nice and hot. Letās get started.
Enjoy!
Horror legend Stephen King has written a fair few books over the years. Ever since he burst on the scene with “Carrie”Ā in 1974, he’s given fans at least one book nearly every year. Since most of his work has been extremely popular, he’s also established himself as a bit of an authority on the horror front ā and isn’t shy about commenting about either the genre or his craft as a writer.
Who doesnāt love Stephen King? Iāve only read a few of his books but my wife Kim has read everything heās ever written, including his first attempt at self publishing a digital book called The Plant.
I enjoyed following him when Twitter was around and Iām thrilled heās joined Threads so I can follow him once again.
Now, can we please get his account connected to Mastodon?
Mozi is a social app ā not in the sense of āsocial media.ā But in the sense of interacting with other people and building relationships.
Itās nice to see an actual social app. I was working with a small group back in 2015-2016 building this exact application. It was called Jaunty but execution is what matters and Mozi is beautiful.
Abid Rahman ā¢ The Hollywood Reporter
Bluesky Hits 25M Users As Exodus From X Continues
I still prefer Mastodon but itās really nice to see Bluesky growing and Space Karenās social network shrinking.
Iād encourage folks to checkout Mastodon and use their mobile app to sign up and use mastodon.social as your instance, itās the default. Once you learn how an instance works and what it means to be on a different instance you can move your account. And, no, you donāt have to move, ever. š
Matthew Christopher ā¢ Atlas Obscura
Even looking down from a rooftop onto the overgrown ruins of Lenin Square, itās difficult to comprehend the scale of loss in Prypiat, Ukraine. Perhaps, like me, youāve been fascinated by the tragedy of Chornobyl, as it is known in Ukrainian*, for decades.
Iām fascinated by Chernobyl. I remember when the meltdown was reported and the confusion and concern that followed. Things couldāve been much, much, worse.
From Brazil to Mexico and beyond, NASCAR continues emphasis on global expansion
The thing about this expansion is itās all about having a local league. What Iād like to see is the NASCAR Cup Series go to different countries. In 2025 NASCAR will visit Mexico City and thatās a great start but Iād like to see them go to Europe and run some of the most famous tracks in the world.
[Christine Lemmer-Webber] (https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/)
A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky’s team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.
The two pieces from Christine and the response from Bryan Newbold are really good reads. If youād like to understand a bit more about how ActivityPub/Mastodon work vs. ATProto.
Emily Hemphill ā¢ The Daily Progress
Standing on the corner of Water and Second streets off Charlottesvilleās Downtown Mall this past September, two men tilted their heads back to fully take in the towering husk of a building that has sat derelict for roughly 16 years.
When I started at WillowTree I was in the building diagonally across from it and itās a complete wreck and an eyesore. It should be torn down to make way for something beautiful.
I miss working on the mall. I wish the company was still down there.
The picture above was taken in December 2019, looking down on the Downtown Mall. It was the first snow of the season.
NASCAR Shocks FRM and 23XI by Withdrawing Charter Offer Amid Legal Dispute
This isnāt a surprise to me. Front Row and 23XI filed a lawsuit against NASCAR. They followed up by asking the court to not allow their current charters to expire and it sounds like NASCAR won that battle.
I hope 23XI and Front Row survive.
Electron and React Native are taking over the world
At work we’ve started using Bruno. It’s nice but it’s also an Electron App. I’m already learning React Native on iOS because we are getting a lot of requests for applications written using React Native. We build apps for clients so it makes sense for their apps to be written once so they work on both Android and iOS. They get their money’s worth, I suppose. It’s all about squeezing more out of us. But what does that say about craft? To me it says it doesn’t matter. We’ve fallen into the Accenture trap. We are hired guns who need to pound out code everyday at the fastest possible pace, with high quality of course, and use the lowest common denominator toolset. š¤¢š¤®
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit spicy this morning for some reason. I really need to improve my SwiftUI and pound all the new concurrency stuff into my tiny brain but I’m torn because to be useful to my company I need to become a React Native expert.
Guess I’ll have to use Stream and Top Secret Project to learn SwiftUI and Swift Concurrency. šš¼
Apple honors 2024 App Store Award winners
Congratulations to all the winners!
Not gonna lie, Iād love to have one of those blue beauties on my shelf. š
My apps need to be so much more polished and feature rich before I could even dream of such an honor. I have the likes of Unread, Reeder, and NetNewsWire to compete with. All beautifully designed and developed.
Having said that, you should go download Stream and leave me a tip! š
Dutch Brothers iOS App
Gotta say it, the Dutch Brothers Coffee app is really well done. Itās beautiful, stable, has a personality, and does exactly what itās supposed to do. Lets you order and pay for coffee.
I wonder who makes it? Do they do all dev work in house or do they have a studio, like WillowTree, work on it? Iām super curious.
If you know, send a message my way, rob.fahrni@gmail.com.
Heh. Since everyone is posting their Spotify Wrapped stuff Iām gonna give yāall my top artists of 2024 from Apple Music.
This isnāt surprising, at all.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
Itās been nice and chilly this week and Iām here for it. It was a balmy 18F (-7C) when I woke up this morning.
I have to run out and help our daughter move some furniture then finish decorating the house with Christmas lights so I have to scramble to put this together this morning.
I hope you enjoy the links!
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is reshaping social media, but advertising isnāt off the table
Bluesky is really catching fire all of a sudden. Iāve been finding more and more folks to follow and their Starter Pack feature is amazing! It allows you to share a list of folks to follow with anyone. Great feature. I hope Mastodon clones it. š
UPDATE 10:45AM: Mastodonian Jolly Jcrabapple (no relation) pointed out Mastodon DOES HAVE Starter Packs! Woo-hoo! š„³
But I have written my last op-ed for the Times. Yesterday, I resigned my position. I donāt want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons.
The Los Angeles Times has gone off the MAGA deep end. Their billionaire owner is bending the knee to the Orange Man and Space Karen.
Steven Monacelli and Tristan Lee ā¢ Texas Observer
REVEALED: THE OPERATORS BEHIND FOUR MAJOR NEO-NAZI X ACCOUNTS
Out Nazis. We donāt want or need them in this country. We created our own, smaller, version of Nazis with the Confederacy. I see enough of that crap here in The South, I donāt need Nazis to join in.
Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were āmissingā from archives ā that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future (M. P. Eve J. Libr. Sch. Commun. 12, eP16288; 2024).
This report is eye opening and very sad. Weāre losing so much information. Shared knowledge is a gift to the world. All of that hard work, lost. š
Festivitas hangs holiday lights on your Mac
Iāve seen fun stuff like this in the past ā- I had one once that would cause it to snow on your desktop. Go give Festivitas a look and support an Indie Dev if you like it. š š¼
A driver moving on from a race team is a lot like graduating from school. At the yearās end, loaned items need returning and lockers cleaned out. At some point, the open-door policy ends and the keycard access denied.
Michael McDowell is moving from Front Row Motorsports to Spire Motorsports. Spire has been making big moves. Picking up Carson Hocevar and firing Corey Lajoie in favor of McDowell. The team of McDowell and Hocevar should be pretty darned good next season.
There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python.
This is really cool. I love reads like this. While these improvements may not make a real difference in day-to-day use Iād personally still pursue these optimizations. If you have a great suite of unit tests you should feel very confident in the rewrite of small areas of code like this. Bravo! šš¼
For the last 10 years, Iāve worked at a desk at home, with a desktop Mac as my primary computer. But over the last year or so, Iāve been using my MacBook Air a lot more, whether Iām traveling or spending the winter in a heated room rather than my unheated garage.
For me itās been about a MacBook Pro ā Iāve had 15, 16, and 17in versions āwith full-size monitor, keyboard, and mouse connected to it at my desktop since 2007āish. Modern M based Macās are blazing fast. Perfect computers, really.
I feel like Iām being watched. š¤£
Ms. Gracie living her best life. š¤£
How long will it take Trump to cross a line Americans cannot stomach?
How long after that does the next Civil War start?
How much cruelty will you put up with before doing something about it? I guess we all may have to answer that question in 2025.
Birthday Fun
We caught Red One at our local Regal on Friday afternoon and all of us really enjoyed it. š š¼
We prefer Alamo Drafthouse but their last showing was on Wednesday evening. Regal worked.
It was a great way to spend my birthday. I got my free birthday Starbucks and pizza that evening. āļø
Just a really great day. Iām a pretty simple person. I love little things with family.
Itās also a family tradition to pick a place for dinner. I chose to wait for breakfast with everyone yesterday morning. I chose Cracker Barrel. Simple, tasty, food. š„
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! āļø
It was nice having a short week to ease back into work, and a slow week at that as we headed into a four day weekend.
Yesterday I hit 57, the big 60 is hiding just around the corner and the walk to retirement age is just around the corner from that. Itās strange. I donāt feel that old mentally. My body is broken but my spirit and mind are doing fine.
On with the linkage! Enjoy. š
Eleanor Beardsley and Chandelis Duster ā¢ NPR
French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, took a tour of the cathedral early on Friday. Macron marveled at the soaring light stone ceilings ā now cleansed of soot and centuries of grime ā as he toured the more than 800 year old restored cathedral.
With all the bad news in the world I thought Iād share some hope. It was so depressing to see Notre Dame burn. But itās back! Thatās something to celebrate.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how social networks die, these past two years. It’s an unusually personal topic. In 2009, I picked up my life to move to San Francisco and work for Twitter. I joined a startup you could fit around a giant lunch table, and left a corporation with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users.
Watching Twitter disappear was a real loss for the web. It was mostly a great place, at least for me, and it opened us all up to a new form of communication and breaking news. We could follow our favorite news organizations and movie stars and on occasion even interact with them. It was great. Now itās just one big dumpster fire.
Seeing ActivityPub and AT Proto come along has been a breath of fresh air. Could you imagine if Twitter was still Twitter and embraced AT Proto? That wouldāve been something.
While Javascript is unavoidable, hereās how I think one should try to limit its spread.
JavaScript is eating the world, just like C did in the 80ās and early 90ās.
Iād call WillowTree a premier native iOS and Android shop, amongst other things, and now weāre doing a lot more React Native and TypeScript. I know of native iOS Apps that use JavaScript internally for business logic. Itās handy. Itās an ugly language but useful.
Formula 1 on Monday at last said it will expand its grid in 2026 to make room for an American team that is partnered with General Motors.
Iām very excited for this! Iāve wanted to see an American manufacturer back in F1 for quite a while. I know Redbull is working with Ford on a new power unit but itās nice to see Cadillac dedicated to the entire sport. They will become my new team on the grid. Iāve low key supported Haas for a number of years and always wanted them to switch to an American power unit manufacturer. Maybe they will at some point. Haas runs Ford motors in NASCAR why not move to them for F1 if they can get Ford behind them.
Michelle Del Ray ā¢ The Independent
Amazon workers are planning to strike from Black Friday through Cyber Monday to hold the company accountable for ālabor abuses,Ā environmental degradationĀ andĀ threats to democracy,ā organizers say.
I didnāt pay attention to this yesterday so I wonder how things went?
I had never done anything even vaguely approaching web development before I made this site. I probably couldn’t have even told you what it meant. I did have a bit of coding experience (I used a lot of python for my degree), but this was very different. I could not have done it without the help of the people who came before me and were generous enough to create guides for the rest of us. These are the resources I used the most
Neat! I love seeing folks whoāve never done this kind of work pull something beautiful together. Great work!
In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheilās uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Giffordās own earnings. The similarities extend, in Giffordās telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos.
This is kind of weird. Was it intentional or did it just happen? It seems thatās the lynchpin to the case.
I’ve been helping getting MacStories setup on Bluesky this weekend and I came across a few handy sites.
Iāve been using Bluesky a bit more now that I can follow more folks I know and those famous people I like. More tools, please.
Will this be a big enough thing for folks like Iconfactory and Tapbots to enter the market?
Most people writing code that ends up running on macOS machines arenāt super familiar with the operating system, its unique features or its rough edges. Thatās okay! If youāre a programmer using macOS and your code will actually end up running on a Mac rather than a server somewhere or whatever ā even if your software isnāt a user-facing graphical application ā then this post is for you.
I know concurrency support in Swift 6.0 is a big topic of conversation but I gotta be honest, I find it terribly confusing. Old school threading and rules around it are so much easier to grasp.
Of course I need to dive into the Swift 6.0 version of concurrency. But I think itās good to learn it at a lower level.
Comparing ActivityPub and AT Proto is a useful exercise. Itās tempting but ultimately too simple to say that one is decentralized and one is centralized.
AT Proto is something Iād like to know more about. Itās so different but it does seem quite powerful and I wonder if parts of AT Proto could be used under ActivityPub? It seems to me like it could, unfortunately I canāt remember the name of the part Iām referring to.
I donāt know about you, but if I were to look at all of this as an outsider, it sure would look as if C++ is basically falling apart, and as if a vast amount of people lost faith in the ability of C++ās committee to somehow stay on top of this.
I can only imagine how difficult it must be to maintain backward compatibility for a language as old as C++ and continue to advance it.
I hope it doesnāt splinter and make a mess out of a tried and true low level programming language. Thereās so much code out there that needs to continue working and advancing the language without breaking things is crazy challenging.
My daughter took me out for coffee this morning. Mmmmmmm, Grit.
