Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

What a week. We started the week celebrating a man of compassion, peace, and love, a great American!

At the same time swore in a new President. A convicted felon and rapist. A man who doesn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. A man who only loves himself. In other words, a garbage human.

Like I said, what a week.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Jean Boussier

Instrumenting Thread Stalling in Ruby Applications

Another nice post that peaks under the hood of Ruby. I won’t spoil the mystery here. Go read the post. 😃

Zac Bowden • Windows Central

Microsoft is gearing up to ship two new versions of the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro that have smaller displays, designed to be lighter and more portable for people looking for a more travel-friendly PC. Both devices will be premium products, and feature display sizes roughly around 11- or 12-inches, my sources say.

I’ve wanted a Surface Pro since the original version shipped. I love the form factor and it runs a full blown operating system.

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news that Nosferatu director Robert Eggers will follow his vampire movie with a 13-century werewolf thriller called Werwulf, and today’s news that Nosferatu is in the running for four Academy Awards, the Eggers news drops keeps landing: Deadline reports that Eggers has signed a deal to direct a sequel to Jim Henson’s 1986 fantasy Labyrinth.

How do you replace David Bowie? You don’t. Our youngest daughter loves this film and absolutely hates the idea of a sequel. Can’t say that I blame her.

Andrew Webster • The Verge

Doom: The Dark Ages looks metal as hell and launches in May

We haven’t played a game on our XBox in ages. We’ve played some Mario Kart on the Switch but the XBox is basically a dust collector. But this game looks like it could be really interesting and anything called “metal as hell” is good in my book.

Matt Mastracci and Michael J. Sullivan • EdgeDB Blog

We’ve been working on a new HTTP fetch feature for EdgeDB, using reqwest as our HTTP client library. Everything was going smoothly: the feature worked locally, passed tests on x86_64 CI runners, and seemed stable. But then we noticed something strange: the tests started failing intermittently on our ARM64 CI runners.

This particular bug wouldn’t have happened on Windows because you can build the CRT to be thread safe. Of course they may have other issues on a Windows box. 😄

Harry Roberts

The web platform moves slowly, and I understand that can be frustrating for developers who want to innovate, but over a decade of consultancy experience has taught me time and time again that the alternative is much more restrictive in the long term. What’s brand new today starts to show its age much more quickly.

I figure a web developer type would understand this better than I. Doing work on native desktop or mobile computers could present the same issues but typically doesn’t. Our frameworks are provided by the platform vendor. Now, using them without an abstraction absolutely locks you into the platform and major changes are typically few and far between, but they absolutely do happen.😃

Mary Ann Azevedo • TechCrunch

Stripe is laying off 300 people, but says it still plans to hire in 2025

Sigh. This is one of those companies I’d have applied to as an iOS developer if I were in the market for a job. Working on an SDK or component level would be a great deal of fun. To see them have layoffs is a real bummer and points to how fragile the tech sector remains.

Andrew Benson • BBC

Haas have restructured their race operations team with a series of changes that include appointing Laura Muller as the first female race engineer in Formula 1.

I’m still a bit miffed at Haas for firing Gunther Steiner but this move sounds like a good one.

Bert Hubert

So how hard could it be. As input we have something like in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.

Don’t get me started on dates. We had to deal with all these issues when I was at Pelco. Just never, ever, convert the date from UTC in your system until you need to display it. It’s easy to convert it to local time then use it somewhere else like that.

Luckily we had a really great developer who understood these issues and built us a really great date class for handling all those sticky issues for us.

Niall Doherty • Louder

“It’s the most spontaneous thing I’ve ever been involved in” : the story of Mad Season, the grunge supergroup that Mike McCready hoped would save Layne Staley

For some reason the story of Layne Staley’s death really bothers me. His friends knew he was an addict and it caused a lot of problems in the band. But try as they might they could never get him to get help. He spent his final days locked away in his apartment, frightfully skinny, alone. Mike Starr, Alice In Chains bassist, visited Staley and begged him to go to the hospital. Staley wouldn’t hear it so Starr left. It’s believed it was the last time anyone saw Staley alive. He was discovered approximately two weeks later, partially decomposed, full syringe next to him. Sad, sad, ending to a talented soul.

Charith Amarasinghe • Railway

Since the beginning, Railway’s compute has been built on top of Google Cloud Platform. The platform supported Railway’s initial journey, but it has caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business. More importantly, building on a hyperscaler prevents us from delivering the best possible platform to our customers.

Folks that run “bare metal” servers feel like race car mechanics to me and I love reading stories like this. There was a time when I wanted to be a Render Wrangler at Pixar. All that raw horsepower committed to making the greatest animated film on earth was attractive to me.

Ghost

At the start of last summer, we announced that we would start working on ActivityPub support for Ghost to bring long-form publishing to the largest decentralised networking protocol on the web.

It’s been really nice to see more blogging platforms embrace ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

I’m a very happy user of Micro.blog and their integration with ActivityPub and the Fediverse is second to none. They also support cross posting to Tumblr and Bluesky, and of course Mastodon. You can even follow Micro.blog users from Mastodon. It’s really well done.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday.

This is really interesting but I wonder why he’s thinking about using At Proto instead of ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Pixelfed and Loops have been picking up steam and it’s extremely nice to be able to follow someone on Pixelfed right from my Mastodon client. You can do the same with Loops. It’s just an amazing way to integrate all social media.

Politics

Jason DeRose and Sarah Ventre • NPR

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President,” Bishop Mariann Budde said in her 15-minute sermon. “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said Budde, as she appeared to look towards the president.

Bishop Budde has more guts than all those fat cat billionaires sitting behind his orangeness during his swearing in.

She is a real Christian. God is a god of love. Jesus’ message was all about love and compassion. Can’t these MAGA supporters see that? A lot of American Christians need to wake up. You’ve missed the message. Trump and his administration are all about cruelty. If that’s what you’re after, fine. Just don’t say you’re a Christian who follows the teachings of Jesus.

Evan Hurst • Wonkette

There was a prayer service at the National Cathedral on Tuesday, and Trump and Melania attended (this time not dressed as the Babadook), along with JD and Usha Vance and members of the Trump crime family and all kinds of others. And one of America’s greatest heroes, Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopalian bishop for Washington DC, decided to speak truth to power, softly and carrying a big stick, and that stick was J-E-S-U-S.

Zack Beauchamp • Vox

Elon Musk doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt

The man is a Nazi. It’s just that plain. When he put his hand over his chest and flung it out he could’ve left his palm facing inward, but he didn’t. He chose to turn it down.

He’s a Nazi. He’s a racist. He is trying to remake America into a white nation while he rapes, pillages, and plunders our resources for his own selfish goals. I have no idea what those are but he’s definitely up to something.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

The evidence is now undeniable. In front of thousands at Donald Trump’s inauguration rally, Elon Musk - the world’s richest man and owner of X - performed not one but two Nazi salutes.

David Gutman • The Seattle Times

Judge in Seattle blocks Trump order on birthright citizenship nationwide

Birthright citizenship is right there in black and white in the Constitution. Trump is a nasty human being who deserves to be smacked around as often as possible. Of course that wouldn’t snap him out of it. He’s a narcissist and a sociopath. He only cares about himself.

Ms. Gracie cuddling with her toy hoard. 🥹

She’s falling asleep like that.

Another cold morning here in the Charlottesville area. 🥶

On the bright side we’re going to hit a high of 37! That’s 15 degrees warmer than yesterday’s high!

Fourteenth Amendment

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

There it is, plain as day. It’s way more clear than the Second Amendment the wing nuts cling to.

If you’re born here, you are a citizen.

I mean, can Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Zuck, and whoever else gave money to Marmalade Messiah give me $1MM each, or heck, $1MM total between all of them? I’d be ok with that. I promise I would use it wisely and wouldn’t use it for corrupt reasons.

I feel bad for the folks who made a living on TikTok. I’m hoping they’ll find another job to take the place of being an influencer or whatever they did on TickTok to make a living.

As for the folks who are bummed because they liked watching it. You’ll get over it. I wasn’t happy when Space Karen took over Twitter and shut down the API so I stopped using it, exported my tweets, and deleted my account. I don’t miss it because Mastodon is even better and isn’t controlled by a single company.

I suspect it will be back soon. Hang in there.

Chiefs over Texans Lions over Commanders Bills over Ravens Eagles over Rams

The Bills/Ravens game is gonna be a great game.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

A polar vortex is heading our way this weekend. It’s been chilly this morning but it’s not bad. We’ve had lower temperatures over the last few week.

The forecast calls for snow tomorrow and single digit temperatures — Fahrenheit — next week. Guess we’ll see how accurate they are in a few days.🥶

We still have the tiniest bit of snow on the ground and expect a few inches tomorrow.❄️

On to the links!

Brian Tallerico • Roger Ebert

Lynch was one of those creative voices who found his own octave, doing for film what people like David Bowie or Prince did for music, shattering expectations of what a piece of art could be.

Dune, Twin Peaks, and Blue Velvet are the productions I remember the most. I know Dune is not universally liked but I’ve always liked it and Twin Peaks was spooky and creepy. I barely remember seeing Blue Velvet but now I need to watch it again.

RIP 🪦

Steve Seigh • JoBlo

The Milwaukee Brewers legend, Baseball Hall of Famer, iconic announcer, and beloved actor Bob Uecker passes away at 90.

I remember Bob Uecker being funny, especially in the movie Major League and his Miller Light commercials with his famous “Must be in the front row.”

RIP 🪦

Dan Sinker via Bluesky

Honestly the story I want someone to break wide open is the drug epidemic among the tech elite

I’ve tried to get my doctor(s) to prescribe me testosterone or HGH, they wouldn’t do it. But, if you’re rich you can get folks to help you find someone willing to get things for you.

Ivan Mehta

Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new non-profit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project.

This is really great news for Mastodon and the Fediverse. With all the hubbub surrounding governance of WordPress it’s nice to see this happening with Masstodon. I hope it works as expected.

Umar Shakir • The Verge

Pixelfed, a decentralized and ad-free Instagram alternative, now has apps on iOS and Android, as reported by TechCrunch. The iOS app launched today, while the Android app launched on January 10th.

Folks walking away from Facebook and Instagram should absolutely consider using Pixelfed. It’s very similar to Instagram but it’s based on Fediverse protocols so it’s easy to follow folks from Mastodon if you’d like. No Pixelfed account required.

Brian Stelter • CNN

Jen Rubin exits Washington Post, joins Norm Eisen to launch new outlet countering ‘authoritarian threat’

This is a huge move. I’m a Democrat but I’ve always read and respected Jennifer Rubin. She’s been a constant critic of Donald Trump and his ilk and I’m looking forward to reading The Contrarian everyday.

Paul Sawyers • TechCrunch

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project.

The infighting and lawsuit being fought by WordPress and Matt Mullenweg could destroy the entire organization. I hope they’re able to keep things together and WordPress continues to be used worldwide.

I’ve had an idea for a blogging system based on WordPress for years. I blame my friend, Bill Lazar, for planting the idea in my brain. 😃

There are so many things around blogging I’d love to build. Time to do it is the thing I’m missing.

Chris Geidner • Law Dork

TikTok, creators face tough day at SCOTUS, with ban set to go into effect on Jan. 19

It sounds like there may be some last minute heroics by politicians or incoming President Orange Man to push this off for the next 90-days.

Ultimately finding a way to keep CCP propaganda out of American feeds would probably be the better solution, but I think that would take heavy government involvement and regulation. Perhaps an independent TikTok organization who share TikTok client code and service code but run them independently?

Emily Guerin • LAist

Newsom’s order aims to help Angelenos, but is rebuilding in the same areas a good idea?

So many folks lives have been turned upside down. Talking about rebuilding seems premature but if you’re living on the street or in your car you’re ready to get your new house built.

John Scalzi

If you want to know when I pretty much drew a line though my friendship with Neil Gaiman, it was when Neil acknowledged that he made moves on his early-20s nanny on her first day of employment.

It’s so difficult to believe Neil Gaiman is such a creep.

Alina Selyukh • NPR

Tractor maker John Deere faces a federal lawsuit that accuses the company of illegally forcing farmers to use only authorized dealers for critical repairs, boosting its multibillion-dollar profits.

When I was employed at Agrian we’d talk about this from time to time. Forcing farmers into contracts that don’t give them the power to repair their own equipment is so costly. Most farmers I know are skilled at fixing their equipment. My grandfather made his living for well over 50-years repairing Cat equipment in fields all over California. Sure, he was an independent mechanic and welder, but he sure could turn a wrench and fix anything, and his services didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

David Purdum

Saquon Barkley looked to be off to the races, headed for a last-minute touchdown that would have had no impact on the outcome of the Philadelphia Eagles' 22-10 win over the Green Bay Packers on Sunday but would’ve cashed a lot of tickets for the betting public.

How many players, coaches, and team employees are gambling on teams? How long before they start making deals with the players to throw games for big money?

I’m glad Barkley slid. Your bet means nothing to the game.

Politics

Steve Beschloss • America, America

But as much as the Democrats stripped away Hegseth’s arrogant, macho veneer to illustrate his lack of traditional qualifications—and that particularly included questioning his documented record of drunkenness, sexual abuse and hostility toward women and female combat soldiers—it was painfully clear that the unqualified Hegseth’s main purpose was to smile and nod as the Republicans waxed rhapsodic about him and to push back with aggression or sneer silently when Democrats dared to doubt Donald Trump’s insulting pick to run our military.

Hegseth is an unqualified buffoon, adulterer, and drunk. A perfect choice for the Marmalade Messiah.

President-elect Donald Trump said his inauguration on Monday will take place inside the U.S. Capitol rather than outdoors because of severe cold, the first time in 40 years that U.S. presidential inaugural ceremonies will be moved indoors.

The reason is simple. Through all the bluster, Donald Trump is just a big sissy boy. He’s afraid he’s gonna get a little cold sitting outside. A real man would suck it up and enjoy the moment.

Well, there’s that, and he’s terrified his crowd size will, once again, be much, much, smaller than previously. Remember how tiny his crowd was in 2017? Yeah, it was tiny compared to the mass of folks who went for President Obama or President Biden who followed him.

He’s so hated I’d imagine most of the CEO’s he’s somehow gotten to be there would rather be sitting alone in the cold than be seated behind him.

I keep expecting to read of another assassination attempt on the Marmalade Messiah.

It will happen. He’s equally adored and hated here in the States. Worldwide I’d imagine there is more hatred for the man.

I’ve been wondering the same thing. 🤔

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We got a little winter wonderland last Sunday night and into Monday. Overnight we got a tiny bit more. Not enough to cripple Charlottesville or the surrounding area, just enough to make it really dangerous to use the roads on Monday and Tuesday. ❄️

The remainder of the week has remained below freezing and next week is expected to be the same. 🥶

My coffee is piping hot and I’m ready to share some links. I hope you enjoy them.

Oh, I almost forgot! I now have a store for Stream.

By Jessie Yeung and Rebekah Riess • CNN

Deadly Los Angeles wildfires: New evacuation orders as biggest blaze stretches east

Being a native Californian I understand what these poor folks are going through. This sort of thing has become all too familiar to people in Norther and Southern California. There is a Fire Season in California for heavens sake and each year brings some kind of fresh hell to the state.

Oh, and those poor people have more of this to look forward to due to climate change. Joy.

If you think the response to the fires was botched, think again. These fires spread quickly due to Santa Anna winds blowing up to 98MPH. It’s believed that caused the fire to spread quickly and now there are fire fighters working around the clock on four different fronts.

Here’s hoping they get them under control soon! ❤️

Nick Schäferhoff • WordPress.com

So, you are considering creating a personal website. Congratulations! In my opinion, that’s one of the smartest decisions you can make.

Now, more than ever, is a great time to create a weblog. Social media companies like Facebook and X have become more hateful than ever. It’s time to own your content and stop feeding the corporate marketing machines with your stories.

I recommend Micro.blog for blogging and Mastodon for your social timeline. Micro.blog also has a social timeline that is compatible with Mastodon and Bluesky. It’s well worth the $5/month. I haven’t used Micro.one but it’s a less expensive version on Micro.blog at a super cheap $1/month.

This blog is hosted by Micro.blog so it’s extremely easy for me to recommend.

Bobby Borisov • Linuxiac

In a remarkable two-year effort, the maintainers of the popular Fish Shell have officially released a beta of Fish 4.0—this time written almost entirely in Rust instead of C++.

I find this fascinating. I always tell folks that rewrites are typically the death of a thing. This team may be an exception to that rule.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this project to see how folks feel about the new shell.

Slashdot

Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic’s handling of a disputed plugin.

This is a wild turn of events I’d imagine is designed to get WP Engine to contribute more to the WordPress project because they’ll need to if they’d like to see new features added.

I don’t want anything to do with the politics behind this. Wordpress is a great piece of software and I hope it continues to be. Not updating as frequently may be a good thing. It’ll allow the community to take a deep breath and not worry about future changes causing additional bugs. It will also allow folks to stabilize and fix whatever bugs they’re aware of since that looks like a primary focus going forward. I hope it works. 🤞🏼

Jens Gustedt

With this post I will concentrate on the here and now: how to use C’s future lifesaving defer feature with existing tools and compilers.

Defer is one of those keywords/features I really appreciate about Swift. It’s really nice to have a compiler enforced way to guarantee your code can cleanup, even if something goes wonky. 👍🏼

Ryan Christoffel • 9To5Mac

AMD introduced a powerful new laptop chip today, the Ryzen AI Max. The company compared its new chip to Apple’s M4 line in several benchmarks, but there’s a very important detail it left out.

Heh, I didn’t realize AMD didn’t compare their new chip to Apple’s M4 Max. Hey, AMD still has a generally useful chip and I’m sure laptop makers are ready for it.

Richard Lander • .NET Blog

We maintain multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN) instances for delivering .NET builds. Some end in azureedge.net. These domains are hosted by edg.io, which will soon cease operations due to bankruptcy. We are required to migrate to a new CDN and will be using new domains going forward.

One would think Microsoft, with its deep pockets, would spend a little cash to keep this bankrupt company afloat while they properly transition their services to their own data center. It’s also odd to me that Microsoft would use a third-party for this service being its important infrastructure. Weird.

I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall of those meetings.

Nick Ripley

Recently I diagnosed and fixed two frame pointer unwinding crashes in Go. The root causes were two flavors of the same problem: buggy assembly code clobbered a frame pointer. By “clobbered” I mean wrote over the value without saving & restoring it. One bug clobbered the frame pointer register. The other bug clobbered a frame pointer saved on the stack. This post explains the bugs, talks a bit about ABIs and calling conventions, and makes some recommendations for how to avoid the bugs.

Oh my goodness I love reading tech articles like this. Go is one of many new classes of memory safe languages. But the memory safety is only as good as the language team’s tooling.

This article explains how one person just made Go a bit more safe for all of us.

Jacob Bartlett

In 2017, Chris buggered off to mess around with AI. Tim Cook’s MBA buddies began to wriggle their tendrils into Swift and guide it towards its next life stage.

Swift has 217 keywords? Good grief. I don’t use many of those, I’m certain of it. I’m not very bright and I’m very slow to learn new stuff. I’m champing at the bit to fully embrace SwiftUI and async/await support in Swift 6.0. Ive found async/await to be particularly difficult to grok. The current networking code in Stream is working just fine so I have plenty of time to adjust to async/await as long as Apple doesn’t deprecate their old support. Fingers crossed. 🤞🏼

Liam Reilly • CNN

The Washington Post on Tuesday laid off roughly 100 employees across its business division, the latest indication of the newspaper’s financial woes after subscribers and staffers revolted over owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

I’m hoping Kara Swisher and a group of investors purchase WaPo from Bezos. I don’t. Think it’s for sale but I believe Kara could turn it around and make it into the countries best source of investigative reporting, political or otherwise. I think it would also become a lot braver in its coverage of political corruption in DC.

Politics

I’m trying something a bit different this week. I’m grouping all my political links and opinions here at the bottom so folks can skip it altogether if they’re sick of reading about it.

I’ve had some folks reach out to say they like Saturday Morning Coffee, except for the politics. I understand. I’m sick of it to, but I can’t ignore what’s happened and is about to happen in our country.

So, please feel free to skip this part. It’s about politics! ❤️

Anna Merlan • Mother Jones

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.

I’ve said time and again that Zuck is a sociopath, maybe psychopath? At minimum he’s a narcissist, right? (I’m not a psychologist, but I play one on Saturday mornings.)

This sudden capitulation to Trump is pure cowardice. Marmalade Messiah threatened Zuck and he folded like a cheap suit.

Facebook is now compliant with the destruction of Democracy. Shameful.

Jeff Tiedrich

those are hurricane-force winds. it’s a hurricane made out of fucking fire. one ember can travel miles, land somewhere else, and start a whole new fire — and that’s exactly what’s happening right now all over the Los Angeles area.

It’s really pathetic that Orange Man and Space Karen have tried to turn an absolute tragedy into a political chess piece.

The fire is tragic whether started intentionally or not. It’s not because of DEI or some government conspiracy. It’s tragic. Plain and simple.

Manton Reece

Tim Cook gives $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee. I think this event will be a turning point in how we view the Apple CEO.

I didn’t expect Tim Cook to kiss Trump’s big ass. But here we are. Shameful.

M.G. Siegler

$1M Knee Pads

That is a great summary of what tech CEO’s have been doing. Buying $1M knee pads to kiss Trump’s ass.

I hope democracy can survive the next four years, Trump doesn’t declare himself benevolent dictator, and leaves office after his lame duck term. Here’s hoping.

Please release all the Department of Justice Special Counsel reports behind the indictments of President elect Trump.

As a nation we deserve to know what our future leader allegedly did so we can form our own opinions, given the Supreme Court made it difficult to prosecute a President for crimes committed while in office.

We all know he’s a criminal. We should know about his many crimes.

I’d encourage everyone to make a similar blog post if you have a blog, or post to your favorite social network. We really need this to happen for the good of our country and for future generations to understand what a mistake we made by electing Donald J. Trump to a second term in office.

My new Stream phone cases are live on Cotton Bureau! YAY! 🥳

Now we wait on the t-shirts! This is so exciting!

Anna Merlan • Mother Jones

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 don’t own the internet. It’s open to all.

Dump Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Space Karen’s X.

Go social on the open web with the likes of Micro.blog, Mastodon, or Bluesky.

See what I did with that title? I’m here all week.

It’s been snowing overnight and when we got up this morning Kolby was like “Oh, it’s that cold white stuff. Guess I’d better do my business so I can go back inside.” That’s just what he did. No sniffing about. Get ‘er done.

Gracie on the other hand was like “OMG! I love this stuff it’s 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!”

Keep in mind that Ms. Gracie is a 110 pound Great Pyrenees. She doesn’t 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. 🐶

Now they’re both passed out in the floor. Busy morning.

Snow has started falling. It’s supposed to go all night. Guess we’ll see. 🥶

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m 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 I’m working on and I’m looking forward to seeing what we’re gonna do.

Coffee is in and links are linked. Enjoy! 😃

John Brayton • 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 “Mac assed Mac app.” It’s beautifully designed, fast, and feature rich.

Unread’s biggest unlock is its syncing service. No need to purchase a third party service for sync, it’s built right in.

Highly recommended.👍🏼

Ann Telnaes

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve 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. They’re not helping the country, at all. They’re just as bad, if not worse, than Russian Oligarchs. I never thought I’d see our country come to this in my lifetime. Pathetic.

Mike Allen • Axios

Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration

Boy-oh-boy CEO’s are lining up to kiss Marmalade Messiah’s ass.

I really, really, hate this. Cook is an openly gay man and Orange dude wants the LGBTQ+ community to disappear. He’s supporting a man, and a movement, that hates him with everything in their being.

All these CEO’s are playing right into the authoritarian playbook. They’re obeying in advance. Not good for our nation.

Manton Reece

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. It’s a natural upgrade without gimmicks.

This is an amazing deal for a blogging/micro blogging service.

Congratulations Manton and team!

Noë Flatreaud

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. I’m a fan.

Jayski’s Silly Season Site

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 who’s never been in good equipment until the 2024 season.

Remy Tumin • 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 “Home Alone” time.

Daniel Stern’s 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.

It’s neat to see talented folks like him go off and explore other things. I’d love to have one of his sculptures!

Nic Berg • Hagerty

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. It’s pristine. It’s also really cool of Mazda to buy it back.

John Voorhees

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 they’re able to operate for as long as they want.

Liz Pelly • Harper’s Magazine

Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably 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 don’t play this dishonest game of making up artists.

Amber DaSilva • Jalopnik

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 I’ve 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? 😃

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

The Delta gaming emulator is now providing a link to sign up for Patreon-exclusive membership perks directly within the iOS app in Apple’s 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 they’d 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 • 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 they’ve settled down.

I hope they keep Nissan trucks, they’re really nice.

We’re getting prepared for a deep freeze here in Charlottesville. We’ll 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. 😂

It is supposed to get pretty darned frigid.

Happy New Year y’all! 🥳

Here’s hoping 2025 is really boring for all of us!

I don’t believe in making resolutions for the new year. If something needs doing, just do it.

I’m just starting to feel better after a few days fighting off a stomach bug. There’s 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 I’d touch things they didn’t feel real. No fever, but it’s 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 wasn’t a mistake and so far, so good. No vomiting since Friday but still having issues out the other end. I’ve managed to keep down water and Gatorade just fine. Today I’m hoping some additional solids will help get me over the hump.

All of this to say I’m thinking about my mortality more than ever before. My body is breaking down and I’ve not helped myself by becoming morbidly obese — 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. I’ve become that lazy man I said I’d never become and it’s going to kill me. And still, after all that, I lack the motivation to do anything about it.

What’s wrong with me?

To be totally honest I can’t die anytime soon. I’ve predicted my own demise at 80 years old if things don’t 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 I’ve 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. That’s the most American thing I can think of.

One of my biggest issues is having a positive attitude about things working out. I’ve always felt like we’ll be ok and find our way through. To date, we’ve managed to just that.

I’d 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. 😂

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. It’s a terrible attribute. Why couldn’t I be “addicted” to math the way I am to food? Genetics has something to do with it, I’m sure. I developed a strange attitude after almost dying at the age of 17. My attitude was: If I want it, I’m getting it. A second piece of pie? Yes, please. Yep, another brilliant strategy.

If anyone knows of a study that’s been conducted on people’s relationship with food please point me to it. I obviously have a bad one. It’s like being a crack addict or alcoholic. It’s like staying in that abusive relationship because you’re in love. I’m 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. 🤪

A very Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! 🎅🏼

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 it’s all about audio. I’d love to know how Dave Winer and Adam Curry define it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m 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. It’s excellent! So, if you’re 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. I’d love to have an inch or two for Christmas, but I we don’t have any in the forecast. Just cold, which is also fine.

I hope you enjoy the links!

Matt Mullenweg • 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 Engine’s 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. I’m surprised it hasn’t 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? Shouldn’t WP Engine fork it and do with it what they please? Yes, of course. Will they? I doubt it. They’re 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.

Joost de Valk

We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re 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 “Democratizing publishing”, we’ve 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.

Manton Reece

Some people think that wouldn’t go far enough, that WordPress would be better off with someone new taking over Matt’s role across the project. I’m not convinced. WordPress and Automattic didn’t accidentally become successful. They are successful in large part because of Matt and the teams he built.

The reason I’m linking to Manton is because I think he’s become a leading voice for the open web, blogging, and micro formats. He’s built a nice business on top of open web technologies and fully embraced micro blogging formats like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Nostr. He’s 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 that’s easy. Once you’ve done it, it just magically happens when you post. Easy peasy.

So, if you’re looking for a pure blogging platform give Micro.blog a look. It’s well worth the $5 per month and you can start with a free account just to give it a try.

Cory Doctorow

When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – 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 wouldn’t exist as a single entity, there would be many implementation that all tied together. So far everything is centralized under Bluesky.

I haven’t fully wrapped my brain around what AT Proto really means for the open web. I’d asked what it would take to spin up an instance on Bluesky and I learned there aren’t 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.

Drew McCormack

Today, I’m launching Forked, a new approach to working with shared data in Swift. And it has actually worked out better than I expected. I wasn’t 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. I’m really looking forward to dog fooding it.

This looks extremely interesting to me. I’ve 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 it’ll 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.

Kelly Crandall • Racer

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 Long’s team) in the Cup Series and four (plus one for Long) in the Xfinity Series.

I’ve written before about how much I like B.J. McLeod. He’s the little guy, not some giant team with backing from a major manufacturer like Chevy, Ford, or Toyota. It’s surprising a little team like his can put a fairly competitive car on the track. He’s 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, it’s 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.

I’m looking forward to the opening of the 2025 NASCAR season in February.

Paul Krugman • Bluesky

Reminder for anyone who doesn’t know: I’m writing almost every day on my Substack

I like reading Paul Krugman but he’s 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. I’m not sure if Mr. Krugman plans on having a subscription plan but Substack is a terrible choice for it and his wonderful writing.

Jake Johnson • Alternet

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, we’d 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 • Tom’s 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 rating— 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 80’s.

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?