Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!
Dworkin for Nazi’s
Political Reporter Scott Dworkin has a blog and a newsletter published via Substack.🤮 He should, of course, move it to something like Ghost or Buttondown or Beehiiv
But, if Mr. Dworkin is fine publishing his work using a Nazi supporting platform, he should, at minimum, change his domain name. Why would you use Substack in your domain name? I mean dworkinsubstack.com ties your content directly to a single platform. It’s right there in the name! Your content belongs to you, not Substack.
Here are a few suggestions for you:
dworkinforaliving.com
dworkinreport.com
dworkin.blog
I personally like Dworkin for a Living but the other two are pretty good if I do say so myself.
Mr. Dworkin, please, move your work to a better platform. Maybe one that doesn’t allow Nazi’s to spew hate, misinformation, and disinformation on their platform. Then get a new domain name. They’re cheap.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I made it back home yesterday after a delayed flight and an unplanned overnight stay in Dallas and I’m happy to be here. I was able to kiss my amazing wife and sleep in my own bed. It’s amazing how uncomfortable someone else’s bed can be, especially as I’ve g in otten older. 😀
I hope you enjoy these hand picked, artisanal, links. 😃
On November 12th Thomas Kurtz, the co-inventor (along with John Kemeny who passed in 1992) of the BASIC programming language died at the age of 96.
BASIC was the first language I learned and I’d say I owe my career to it.
RIP Mr. Kurtz. 🪦
In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”
I’m glad he finally made it somewhere else! Now all he needs to do is turn on Mastodon support for his Threads account so I can interact with him from the Fediverse. 😃
Today marks the return of a very MacStories-y feature in one of my longtime favorite apps, which – thanks to this new functionality – is gaining a permanent spot on my Home Screen. Namely, the RSS client Unread now lets you create custom article actions powered by the Shortcuts app.
Unread is just killing it! John is on a tear adding new features and fixing bugs.
I’m @manton on most networks, @manton.org on Bluesky, and @manton@manton.org on the fediverse. These are all managed by Micro.blog.
Yep. You can run everything through Micro.blog if you’d like to see Mastodon and Bluesky accounts natively. Oh, yeah, and there’s that whole blogging thing you get with it. 😃
Well, for some reason, last week I got the notion to re-try my RSS reader. Let me tell you, it was insta-awesome! It feels SO GOOD to be back on RSS. It lets me just read articles from the web — crazy, I know. RSS makes websites legible, stripping out all the distracting garbage.
I think RSS is pretty swell myself. I’m so fond of it I built my own feed reader.
Tom Bowman, Juana Summers, Scott Detrow, Greg Dixon, and Charles Maynes • NPR
Ukraine is granted permission from the Biden administration to fire U.S.-made long range missiles into Russian territory.
I’m happy we’ve done this. Poor Ukraine is going to need every tactical advantage it can get NOW. Pretty soon the Orange Turd will takeover and Ukraine is gonna be in trouble.
Apple is facing an almost £3 billion ($3.78 billion) lawsuit after British consumer group Which? on Thursday alleged that the company breached competition law by locking millions of its customers out of its iCloud service and charging them “rip-off prices.”
I have a lot of thoughts around this and it would be nice to see Apple open the users choice of storage up in a way that makes it transparent to the user. We’ll see what terrible solution they come up with to make it so unattractive to the user no one will choose to use it.
The 40-year-old Minnesota native, who retired in 2019 citing the physical toll from a series of major injuries over the course of her 18-year career, told the New York Times that she had “retired with no intention of coming back”, but was startled to discover that she was pain-free after undergoing a partial right-knee replacement surgery in April.
Having a knee replacement was a freeing experience. Free from pain and free to move about without thinking about where I’m putting my foot. But, I cannot imagine putting on skis and going down a hill at breakneck speeds.
Pro athletes have a different gear than us normals.
Good luck Lindsey! 🍀
On Bluesky, you can set your website as your username. This is one form of verification on Bluesky, and it’s our version of a “blue check.” We highly recommend that official organizations and high-profile individuals do this.
I thought I’d drop a link in here for this older post since Bluesky will let you set your own domain name. Mine is set to @fahrni.me. I love it!
Made it back to Charlottesville, finally. I got back a little after 10:30AM, grabbed a little lunch with Kim, and she drove us from Richmond to Charlottesville on our favorite route home.
It’s been a very chill afternoon, watching movies, nodding off now and again.
It’s good to be home. 🏡
Best leg room I’ve had in a long time.
Just made it! 🥵 Running on zero coffee. I don’t like it. 🤣
Charlotte, NC, here I come!
Ugh. An hour and 15-minutes early may not be early enough to get through TSA here at DFW. I’m afraid I’m gonna miss my flight. ☹️
Well, I finally made it to DFW. I’m at a local Quality Inn. Flight leaves at 5AM tomorrow so I have a 3AM wake up call and a 3:40 Uber. Ugh. 😆
Heading to Denny’s across the street. I’m hungry.
The Joy of Flying
Fun times on my trip home today. My flight was supposed to board at 5:25 this morning. Ultimately putting me home at 6:30 this evening due to a layover in Dallas. That all changed. 🤣
After a couple of updates and delays I now fly out at 12:40PM and arrive home tomorrow at 10AM.
I hope I can get a room in Dallas tonight since I arrive at 6PM and don’t fly out until 5AM tomorrow. If I can’t get a room tonight is gonna suck. 😴
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Fresno, California! ☕️
I’m in California for the next week for my fathers funeral and to settle his affairs. ❤️
I will catch y’all next weekend.
Thinking of Stream for Mac
I’ve neglected Stream for far too long and I don’t know when I’ll have the gumption to get back on it. Learning AppKit has been a slow and arduous process. I really hate when I suck at something. I know, I know, doing the work will make me better but I just don’t have the energy that 20 something me had to stay up all night learning and doing.
Once of these days I’ll get it finished. It may take years to get there but I’ll get there, I hope. 🤞🏼
Of course finishing off the 1.0 of Stream for Mac would allow me to work on Rooster, which is a new codebase and 100% SwiftUI. 😄
Lightly used MacBook Pro for sale, $3,000.00. Don’t lowball me, it’s fine. 🤣
P.S. I know it’s not a MacBook Pro, but it’s funnier this way.
Today marks my fifth anniversary with WillowTree! 🥳
There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that what’s missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network.
There’s a super easy fix for that. Setup a Mastodon server at the Democrats.org and start writing.
C++? Are you crazy, Rob?
There is this weird part of me that wants to go back to writing cross platform C++. All of my cross platform work was for Windows and Linux. The itch has been there since I moved to iOS code — and I spent [two years in between iOS dev jobs working on a cross platform SDK for Pelco’s video encoding, decoding, and recording devices, all in C++. It never made it to Linux but I spent a whole lotta time working on Pelco’s X SDK. That was our version of a cross platform SDK we used internally to build a cool pipeline framework called MPF, or Media Processing Framework.
Why the draw. I’m not sure, but I think it’s probably because it’s the language I know best and I did a lot of work with the Windows API, which was also a strong suit.
I still haven’t, and don’t think I ever will, embrace the Mac like I did Windows. At the time I was a Windows dev the platform was simple, before COM and OLE 2.0. The Windows API was so straightforward.
None of that is true any longer. Not for Windows or C++. I bet I wouldn’t even recognize modern C++. C++ 11 changed A LOT in the language and it’s only advanced since. As for the Windows API, folks still use it but you should be doing something different, like using WinUI 3.
The thing is, I REALLY want to complete Stream for Mac and my new super top secret project: Rooster. Yeah, it’s not so top secret, and I finally gave it a code name, but if you know me you can probably suss out what it would be given my love of blogging.
Is Hate better than Woke? 😳
‘Democrats Are Realizing Woke Is Broke!’ Morning Joe Crew Reads Entire Maureen Dowd Column Slamming Identity Politics
Woke? Come on! Why not talk about the Orange Dude’s misogyny, racism, and just outright hate? That’s what people in America voted for and want. It’s more about that than the Democratic Party being “woke.”
Yes, Democrats believe in equity, inclusion, and empathy for their fellow man. Why the hell shouldn’t we all want that?
Are you flat ass saying hate is the way? No thanks. I want nothing to do with that.
I’ll be here to help black and brown people, LQBTQ+ people, and Women.
Wanting everyone to be treated the same and have the same opportunities isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength. Hate is too easy.
Get outta here with that crap.
UPDATE:
If you have a Threads account, or can see this video, go watch. This guy, whoever he is, nails it
Dad and his boys; Rob, Jerry, and Doug.
On Personal Tragedy, Love, and the Election
Given the circumstances when I went to bed Tuesday night, it was no surprise I was welling up with tears come the morning. But I’d never have expected they’d be tears of joy, with a sense of hope — however diminished — and abiding love in my heart.
This is, without a doubt, the best piece John Gruber has ever written.
Please take the time to read it. John weaves a very personal tragic moment into the tragedy of the election. I cannot get over how great it is. John really is a masterful writer. Wow.
Thank you for sharing such a beautifully written, thoughtful, and personal piece right when we all needed it, John. ✪
Abandoning Space Karen’s X
Jason Herbert • Historians At The Movies
Folks, the Twitter that once was is no longer. It doesn’t fit us anymore. What was once an interesting place to find news, meet people, and share in the human experience is gone, dead, and buried. And Elon Musk is holding the shovel.
It has taken the “normals” a really long time to figure out what a lot of us realized the day Space Karen cut third party access to the Twitter API.
Now if we could convince Mr. Herbert to abandon Substack because of its Nazi problem we will have accomplished something.
A bunch of really great writers have abandoned Substack in favor of Ghost and Beehiiv, you can too Mr. Herbert. 💐
Daniel Jalkut, Core Intuition, Episode 610: Reinventing the 90’s
“People spend hours and days trying to reinvent the 90’s.”
I loved this quote and lol’d when Daniel said it because it’s true. 😃
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s a sad week and what promises to be an extremely dark time in our nations history. Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand — and who’d blame you — I’m talking about the Orange Nightmare winning the Presidential election. It’s so depressing to see that 70+ million Americans decided to choose cruelty over compassion. If, like me, you have a sense of complete sadness and dread you’re not alone. Plenty of us feel this way. I’ve been through the sadness and disappointment period and I’m ready to push back against tyranny any way I can. Black and brown people, LGBTQ+, and women will need our support and help. I stand ready.
Hillel Italie • Associated Press
Quincy Jones, the multitalented music titan whose vast legacy ranged from producing Michael Jackson’s historic “Thriller” album to writing prize-winning film and television scores and collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and hundreds of other recording artists, has died at 91.
RIP 🪦
You personally? Sure, you might have cared enough, but it turns out a lot of those we thought were on our side, those we thought would stand up for their own rights, just … didn’t. Not only didn’t, but they appear to have thrown their lot in with Trump and are willing to let Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, RFK Jr, and the local Preacher Man run their lives. A lot of those women I saw in line yesterday?
Such a well written piece. It’s long but captures the rage, sadness, and confusion many of us feel post election of a complete moron, rapist, criminal to the highest office in the land.
What is a Staff Engineer? I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles. At other times, team members reach out looking to learn how they could get the most value from Staff Engineers on the teams. It is a complicated question because a lot of ambiguity exists in the role. Different engineers have distinct interpretations, so you may get a significantly different answer depending on who you ask.
Excellent piece by Nish. If you’re a software developer give it a read. Staff Engineer is a weird job. They are the glue that binds us together. The player who can fill any position on a team. They’ve usually experienced a lot and have deep skills in a subject but are adaptable.
When I was an Engineering Director I kind of hated my job, I can admit that now. Moving to a Staff Engineer position was one of the best career moves I’ve ever made.
I feel like a hype man sometimes — it’s my personality — and I love doing odd jobs as often as I can. I do it so younger developers can do the fun work. The work that will stretch them and teach them how the platform they’re working on works in real world applications. Then I get to be there when they struggle to help them over the hump. I find it extremely rewarding. Nish’s experience may be completely opposite of mine — he’s a Principal Engineer (I think?), that’s the highest level in our Engineering organization. Regardless, Nish is the complete package. He’s good at everything. ❤️
Alex Henderson, AlterNet • RawStory
“On November 5,” Dalton writes, “the American people did the unthinkable — they elected a convicted felon president. Judge Juan Merchan should now do what was once unthinkable — force a president-elect to take the oath of office in a jail cell.
Boy-o-boy would I love to see that (yeah, it’s petty of me, so what?) I’m hoping there is another option. Can they postpone his sentence until he’s left office, if he leaves office? That way they can nail him properly.
Of course the risk of waiting means the addled old man may die in office and we get no Justice except for the fact he’d be out of office.
John Braydon • Golden Hill Software
While the best websites provide RSS feeds with full article content, some feeds contain only summaries or previews of article content. Without the webpage text feature an article from such a feed would look something like this in Unread
Mr. John Brayton is an excellent developer and his work shows it. He’s Unread’s only developer. That means he toils over iOS, Mac, and server code to make Unread the amazing product it is.
Yes, at one level John and I are competitors, but John’s work is undeniably so much more advanced than mine and that’s ok. I admire him and his work. Yes software developers can also be fans of other developers and their software.
John and I chat on occasion and he’s an amazing human being.
Go support him by taking Unread for iOS and Mac for a spin. You may fall in love with it.
Susie Madrak • Crooks and Liars
David Frum left the Republican Party following Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. “De-registered as a Republican today,” Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote on the social platform X on Wednesday.
I may not agree with a lot of David Frum’s views on policy as a “normal” Republican but I’ve always respected him and I love reading his writing.
Well, the man has finally had enough and left the GOP. Trump and Trumpism has really formed a new party. I wished they’d just give it an official name — perhaps MAGA — and let the GOP have their party back.
So when the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI announced they were doubling down on their efforts to persuade software manufacturers to abandon “memory-unsafe” programming languages such as C and C++, it came as no surprise.
Yes, it’s going to be extremely difficult to replace existing C and C++ software with a memory safe language, but folks should start now. Rust seems to be gaining real ground as a cross platform development language, even being used in Windows and Linux development. Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich has declared all new system level code should be written in Rust. That’s a big darned deal.
Of course you won’t see Apple do that but guess what! Apple has Swift! Swift was written to be highly performant and the syntax would be more familiar to C and C++ developers than is Rust. Yeah, yeah, I’m most likely a bit biased. 😃
Houston residents report receiving text messages telling them they’ve been selected to ‘pick cotton’
And so it begins. One day after the election the hate monger racists emerge from their pits to start their campaign against people who don’t look exactly like them. A lot of young white men voted us into this mess. It’s shameful.
Again, we must fight this tooth and nail to save the rotting soul of this great nation.
An effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is now in the hands of the social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, a service that created mirrored accounts of top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even yours truly), has transferred its collection of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard, the companies announced Thursday.
Flipboard is a for profit company but I do like this move because I’m hoping it’ll get the big news outlets to finally abandon Space Karen’s social platform for Mastodon.
I know that’s asking a lot but folks have been fleeing his platform in greater numbers recently.
In light of Trump winning the 2024 presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris, calls for Sotomayor to retire so that President Joe Biden, with support from a Democrat-majority Senate, would have enough time to appoint a new justice have recirculated on social media.
I’m really not overly thrilled with this idea. Justice Sotomayor is only 70 and should be able to make it through the next four years, unless the Dems calling for her retirement know something we don’t?
I know Democrats are in charge of the Senate but after McConnell’s bullshit with Garland then applying a different set of rules for Amy Coney Barrett I’m a bit gun shy.
However, if they did decide to replace her how about Merrick Garland or Kamala Harris?
I know folks feel like Garland let us down with Trump. I’m pissed off about it too but I still believe Garland is an excellent candidate because he is so measured when it comes to the law, and dammit, the man deserves to be a Justice.
If not Garland how about Kamala Harris? She knows the law and has been in politics more than long enough to play any games she needs to play.
Another petty thing I’d love to see is Biden retiring so Kamala can become the 47th President of the United States and screw up Orange Man’s swag offerings. 😈
Yes, I’m that petty when it comes to that man.
Here’s hoping he leaves office in four years.
Selling your product
Really enjoyed this episode of Under the Radar
As a youngster it was my desire to work for BigCos like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc. Visio is still the best company I’ve ever worked for and the only company I’ve ever spent ten years at. We were acquired by Microsoft in 2000 and I’ve worked there on three different occasions in very different roles.
Anywho, I digress. To be acquired for enough money to retire would be incredible at this point in my life. But I need an incredible product to sell first. 😃
Coke Oreos are not good.
I’ve always loved contrails. I captured this one after my granddaughter pointed up and said “Look Papi, a jet trail.” Made me proud. 🥹
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Were four days away from what is the most consequential Presidential vote in my lifetime, perhaps the country’s lifetime.
Voting is the most important thing you can do to save our democracy.
I’ll leave it at that. I hope you enjoy the links.
Donald Trump may be a known quantity. He’s been a public figure for decades, a television star, and president from 2017-2021. But a second Trump term would present something the United States has never experienced before. Not a would-be authoritarian in the White House—that was Trump’s first term—but a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression.
Don’t vote for this man. He’ll destroy our country as we know it and turn it into a hellscape.
High school students who came up with ‘impossible’ proof of Pythagorean theorem discover 9 more solutions to the problem
I love that a couple of high school kids figured these proofs out. Good for them!
I’m searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There’s no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it.
I have thoughts around this as well that are built around Dave’s desire to use RSS to populate the various services. It deserves a blog post all its own. Maybe I’ll have enough gumption to do that someday. 😃
Over the years, Flutter has attracted millions of developers who built user interfaces across every platform. Flutter began as a UI toolkit for mobile - iOS and Android, only. Then Flutter added support for web. Finally, Flutter expanded to Mac, Windows, and Linux. Across this massive expansion of scope and responsibility, the Flutter team has only marginally increased its size. To help expand Flutter’s available labor, and accelerate development, we’re creating a fork of Flutter, called Flock.
This feels extremely ambitious to me and I fear it’ll fail. Hopefully it doesn’t cause a mess in the community.
Sidney Blumenthal • The Guardian
Donald Trump keeps saying that if he is elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, “the enemies within”. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use “extreme power … We can’t play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people … an enemy from within.”
This man is a menace and must be defeated once and for all. Kick him to the curb so, hopefully, he’ll get the idea he’s not wanted and go play golf for the rest of his miserable life.
Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don’t cough up for the open source code that they use.
Some open source projects thrive and some struggle. If more companies would dedicate some resources to these projects it would be better for everyone involved. We don’t need more incidents like the person who snuck a back door into an open source project or just see them abandoned and left to bit rot.
Currently, the CSS Working Group (CSSWG) is discussing whether to include masonry as part of CSS grid, or as a new layout module?
I like this, especially if the author(s) of masonry agree with the idea.
I wish there were more browsers, and I wish they were more unique. I appreciate that Arc attempted to innovate, but their ego and hubris are a little frustrating. They believe their product is so great that everyone should use it, including their own family and friends. However, when they don’t, they are left feeling perplexed.
I know lots of folks at work using Arc and they love it! I’m skeptical of it. Not because it’s different but because it’s built on Chromium and I don’t trust Google.
A Google engineer presented a proposal to the official standardization committee that would split JavaScript into two languages, a core to be implemented by runtime engines and a more capable variant which depends on tools that compile it down to that core.
I thought the idea of a core was Web Assembly? Maybe that’s too broad? I’d like to know more about what this proposal implies and how would it affect developers.
Michael Miszczak • Just a Pack
A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of caffeinated inspiration/despair, I sat down and wrote a long Facebook post as to why we were ditching Google and switching to DuckDuckGo. Today I want to dive even deeper into this topic, and give you a first-hand account of how Google is killing hundreds of thousands of blogs and small publishers.
Blogs were never really meant to be monetized but enterprising folks have figured out a way to do it.
Unfortunately relying on an advertising company’s search engine to surface your blog to users is risky, as the article points out.
My blog is for me and the ten folks who read it. It’s an outlet. Thankfully I don’t have to make a living from it. I’d starve.
Though Dorsey’s message didn’t specify how many employees would be laid off, sources told Fortune that it could be around 100 employees — or about a quarter of Tidal’s remaining staff. Tidal cut 10 percent of its workers last December, and Dorsey reportedly considered a major reorganization at Block in July.
A few years back, during COVID summer, I tried Tidal, Spotify, and Apple Music. Tidal isn’t bad at all. It’s another competitor in the big music service scene. Granted, it’s the smaller of the three, but the user experience at the time was perfectly fine and the music sounded just fine.
I landed on Apple Music, which has the worst user experience, because it is bundled as part of Apple One. It’s fine.
