Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This morning started off kind of bad. Mr. Flynn decided he’d nudge my hand as I was putting my coffee down. He got hot coffee on his head. He’s ok but he needs to learn the importance of coffee to start your day.

We have two weeks remaining on our current project. I hope the company extends us for more work but they may not. Even if they did there’s no guarantee I’d stay on the project. I’m so into this one all I can see are the things I’d love to improve. 🤞🏼

L.V. Anderson • Slate

As an adult, Kunz loves real coffee. But he also believes that its days are numbered. Climate change is expected to shift the areas where coffee can grow, with some researchers estimating that the most suitable land for coffee will shrink by more than half by 2050 and that hotter temperatures will make the plants more vulnerable to pests, blight, and other threats.

Say it ain’t so! First off we’d all be walking around like zombies. Second, I’d have to change the name of this series. Does Saturday Morning Chicory? Doesn’t quite work for me.

Hesher Keenan • Metal Sucks

When Tool released their latest album Fear Inoculum back in 2019, it was the band’s first new release since 2006’s 10,000 Days. That’s a long fuckin’ time for new music from any band, let alone one with such a rabid fan base as Tool, and it’s something frontman Maynard James Keenan admits probably can’t happen again.

Yes, Tool kept us in suspense for 13 years — Maynard says 14 — but Fear Inoculum was so worth the wait. Now, do I want them to wait for 13 more to produce a new album? I do not. I’m ready for more but if they never produce another studio album I’d be ok with it as long as they keep touring.

Personally I’d love to see them release a bunch of live covers they’ve done through the years. Their version of Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter is so good and Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold, played 1998 in Michigan featuring Buzz from Melvins on guitar is a real banger. Collect them up and do a cover album. I’d love that.

Jeffrey Zeldman

While honeymooning in Rome, we spotted an Italian translation of my second book in the display window of a quaint old shop two blocks from the Colosseum.

Jeffrey Zeldman has given us so many wonderful blog posts through the years. It seems like he doesn’t post nearly as often as he used to so when he does they’re nice reads. This one is short and it’s a fun story.

Howard Oakley

In just two months, SwiftUI will be five years old. First released for macOS Catalina in 2019, it’s hard to believe that it’s only two years younger than APFS. Although I’ve been happily developing my apps using AppKit, one of the major components of Cocoa, I’ve been trying to recreate my app Skint using SwiftUI, so I can create a widget for it.

Neat little tour of Apple frameworks and SwiftUI observations. The bottom line is SwiftUI has some catching up to do. I know it gets better and better with each passing year but it does hold back some apps from making a pure 1:1 transition from UIKit/AppKit to SwiftUI.

Don’t worry, they’ll get there eventually. The good thing is you can drop back to UIKit/AppKit if the SwiftUI version of an API doesn’t support your needs.

Julie Clover • MacRumors

Apple Vision Pro Owners Complain of Headaches, Neck Issues and Black Eyes

I can see the headache and neck issues but black eyes? I believe it’s happening, no need to doubt it, but it’s just not something I’d have expected.

Charles Pulliam-Moore • The Verge

You might know the broad strokes of the Joker and Harley Quinn’s twisted romance from Batman: The Animated Series and other DC projects. But the first trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux makes it seem like director Todd Phillips is doing something very different with his musical take on the characters.

I’m sold. Let’s get this move to theaters already! 🃏

Bryce Covert • The Nation

The factory floors at America’s top seller of electric vehicles are rife with racial harassment, sexual abuse, and injuries on the job.

Does this surprise anyone? Musk is human garbage. Tesla’s board should grow a pair and kick the man to the curb.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for “AI PCs” next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks.

I hope this is accurate. It would be nice to see Windows boxes compete with M series chips.

Anna Tingley • Variety

“Dune: Part Two” is barreling to streaming. The epic sci-fi sequel, starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, will become available to rent and purchase on digital starting Apr. 16, and will release on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on May 14.

I’ll be purchasing the Blu-ray, DVD, Digital combo the day it’s available. What a great film.

Juli Clover • MacRumors

Apple is leasing 45,000 square feet of space in an office building in Miami, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Miami? Really, Apple? Miami? I guess y’all use slave labor in China to produce hardware. Might as well go hang out in a state with an authoritarian Governor hell bent on making Florida a third world state. Disappointing.

Mark Frauenfelder • Boing Boing

A woman who left over $1,000 in tips at a Florida taco restaurant because she thought she was going to be swept up in the biblical rapture on the day of the eclipse, now wants a Rapture refund, claiming the restaurant defrauded her.

Hey, if you’re all in on being Raptured and believe, why worry about that money? You made some people’s lives a little brighter and a little better.

I can’t see this going anywhere.

Ms. Priss set the trap and I fell for it.

It’s been a pretty darned nice day. 🌞

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m still really enjoying the project I’m on at WillowTree and I hope we’re able to extend it further down the road.

I’ve been thinking about a way to fix my completely broken layout of Stream for Mac table view cells. For some reason the same layout I used on iOS isn’t working on macOS? Are the layout engines that different between UIKit and AppKit? No idea. But I do hope my new idea fixes it once and for all.

Then I need to get back to adding async await functionality to my feed adding code. This whole time it’s been synchronous because you really can’t mess with the UI during the initial get of the site data. When you select the feed you’d like to add everything becomes asynchronous, just like feed updating is.

This little change is the fire step in moving all of Stream’s asynchronous code to async await. I still need a much deeper understanding of how it works and why I need it. The code isn’t broken as is today but if Apple requires using async await at some point in the future, it will break.

Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, amirite? 😁

Chris Quinn • cleveland.com

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

It’s extremely difficult to write about Donald Trump as an equal to Joe Biden. Trump is a narcissist, rapist, twice impeached, criminal former President with desire to be a forever Dictator of the United States of America. He wants to end democracy as we know it. He’s only in it for his own gratification, to be cruel, and as a means to enrich himself.

Joe Biden is a leader who believes in helping people and he supports the Constitution. He’s been an effective leader.

Look, no President is perfect. President Biden is no exception to that rule. I’m a liberal and don’t agree with everything he’s done, but he has done great work for the people of the United States.

Vote for democracy. Vote for Joe Biden for President.

Craig Hockenberry • Iconfactory

This post will explain the technology behind Project Tapestry and how we tested it as a prototype. We’ll keep this discussion at a fairly basic level: if you’re a web or app developer, you’ll have no problems following along.

I just love everything Iconfactory does. Yes, I’m a software developer, yes Tapestry will somewhat compete with Stream, but I don’t care. I love this idea and I’m a little green with envy I didn’t think about it. 😃

This is the way to open up your app and make it more easily extensible internally in the process. There are lots and lots of great JavaScript developers out there.

I backed it as soon as I heard about it and I’m really looking forward to the final product.

Matthew Haughey

I’d like a hosted, centralized web app that is akin to early-era Blogger.com that lets me save new posts into a system, then it’s up to me where the output goes.

My blog began life as a Blogger blog. I published this site from 2001 to 2010 completely on Blogger. It generated static HTML and would FTP the generated HTML to my site. I loved it and it was extremely easy to move my site when I changed hosting providers. I just zipped up the directory and expanded it in its new home, updated Blogger to point to the new location, and went back to posting.

Today I publish this site using Micro.blog. It also generates static HTML but it’s all hosted on Micro.blog’s hardware. If I ever leave it’ll be easy to move.

I have been considering a move to a completely hand written blog. 😃

Of course once I started thinking about doing that I thought up some tools I’d like to write to help me out. 😂

Max Tani • Semafor

The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.

This is a piece from January but it is interesting. Like blogging I believe it’s safe to say the idea behind Podcasting was never about monetizing, it was about freedom of expression. But, in the end, you can’t and shouldn’t, stop folks from monetizing it. That’s part of the freedom.

Reliance on a single centralized source of podcasts is a mistake. Apple has been so gracious in sharing their feed directory with the world for nothing it’s difficult to call it a mistake. The fact that it exists isn’t a mistake. The fact that so many podcasting apps and podcasters rely on it is.

There are now many podcast networks, from Indie to BigCo, and some apps and networks have their own directories but Apple is still the dominant player.

Oh, not to mention they have their own player that ships with their OS’es. That’s where the hit to podcast download numbers originated. Apple’s podcasting backend and their distribution front end in the form of the Podcasts app.

Hurubie Meko and Michael Wilson • New York Times

A magnitude-4.8 earthquake sent tremors from Philadelphia to Boston and jolted buildings in New York City. An apparent aftershock was widely felt around 6 p.m.

It’s strange to hear about a quake on the east coast. It was a topic of conversation at work yesterday in our weather Slack channel, of all places.

East coasters aren’t used to this. Here they’re accustomed to cold and snow and hurricanes, not earthquakes.

ROB BESCHIZZA • Boing Boing

Amazon is to end the AI-powered “Just Walk Out” checkout option in its Amazon Fresh stores. It turns out that “AI” means “Actually, Indians” and it isn’t working out.

So now we know what AI actually means! What a complete failing on the part of Amazon. It would’ve been so much better to have failed using AI than to move the jobs of cashiers to India where a bunch of overworked, underpaid, Indians are doing the same job.

Just hire some real people to manage the store.

Matt Birchler • birchtree

You probably got to this post because you Googled some question about what exactly “the fediverse” is, what “ActivityPub” actually means, or what would happen if you turned on federation on your Threads account today.

I still hear about folks struggling to understand how to sign up for Mastodon. The Join Mastodon site should just present the user with a signup form and host everyone on mastodon.social or a new instance and let folks decide what to do next. Most will probably be perfectly happy to stay on that instance forever. 👍🏼

Zack Sharf • Variety

Christian Bale Transforms Into Frankenstein’s Monster in First Look at Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride’

I’m diggin the look of Bales monster. Sign me up for the finished product.

Anthony Bonkoski

Ref-counting is garbage collection.

But is it really? I can see the point but it’s a tough sale for this old curmudgeon. 😂

I wrote a tiny sample to explain reference counted objects to a co-worker years back — 13 years at the time of this writing. It still illustrates the point fairly well, I think.

Today C++ developers get a lot of great reference counting and other newer memory management techniques through the stl.

Sarah K. Burris • Raw Story

Judge Cannon ‘basically inviting’ Jack Smith to ask for her removal in new filing

This judge seems to be incompetent or in the bag for Trump.

Look, the dude took too secret documents home with him. Probably not a big deal if he’d returned them when he was asked to. But no, not his Orangeness, he hold onto them, claiming they’re his through the magical process of declaring them his through mind control or some crap.

The trial is all about that. Not the Presidential Records Act.

My Junior Playing Cards just arrived. They’re extremely nice. Looking forward to using them with Kim.

Had to mess with the home screen again. The new widgets in McClockface are incredible! I love this new Casette Tape widget is beautiful! 😍

Ms. Gracie sleeping on one of her toys, or babies as we call them.

Isn’t she adorable? Yes, she is. 🥺

There’s no fool like an April fool.

Looks like it’s time to buy a new Nereides watch band. The Velcro on this one is failing and the band is pretty faded. I’ve beat the crap out of it.

Taking a little break from digging out the footing for a cinder block retaining wall we’re building. Yeah, I know, my fire pit looks absolutely pathetic. Once some of these other projects are completed I can clean this mess up and get back to building the retaining wall behind the fire pit. 🫠

Solid advice.

KVPR

For more than a decade, Bitwise co-founders Jake Soberal and Irma Olguin Jr. managed to sustain a vision they had for Fresno.

“It’s not at all a mystery,” said Olguin Jr. in a Ted Talk recorded last year. “But we do have to do three very specific and deliberate things. Invite the underdog in the front door. Pay them to learn like it’s their job. And then build them castles in their hometowns.”

In Olguin Jr.’s vision, the underdog city was Fresno. The job was at Bitwise Industries. And the “castles” would eventually rise everywhere – until they started to fall.

I know Irma and Jake personally. They’re pretty regular folks with big dreams just like many of us. I remember well the day I sat down with Irma to discuss what her vision for Bitwise was and how it would help what I once called a Technology Black Hole.

She shared her vision and listened intently to what I had to say. Not that I was giving advice or anything. I was sharing what I’d like to see in Fresno. At the time Bitwise was tiny and Irma and I met in the Tower District of Fresno at the original Hashtag location — I liked this facility a lot.

I’m grateful for everything Irma and Jake did for Fresno and me personally. When I was trying to go out on my own as a freelance iOS developer Shift-3, a Bitwise Industries company, hired me to do some work. They took care of me and I’ll never forget it.

They had this enormous presence in downtown Fresno. Something I adore about Irma and Jake. They wanted to help revitalize the ghost town Downtown Fresno had become. It’s not at all a bad downtown. It suffered the same fate as many downtowns around the country. Urban sprawl. Instead of investing in downtown folks would go off and build office parks and companies flocked to them. I find them horrible for any sort of community building and are often traps to keep employees in the building. In great cities you can walk out of your downtown building and find great places to eat, get a coffee or drink, and go shopping. They’re amazing.

I digress.

When Bitwise collapsed and scandal followed I was heartbroken. All those people busting their butts to make Fresno a better place and make a living to support their families while doing it all gone in an instant.

Fresno is still trying to recover from it and will be for years to come. Not to mention all the lives affected by it.

I wish everyone caught up in the mess all the best for their future. I also wish Irma and Jake well. They had the best of intentions and made huge mistakes along the way.

It’s heartbreaking.

P.S. - KVPR has a nice index of their Bitwise coverage.

Got a picture of this Eastern Tiger Swallowtail yesterday while doing some yard work. We had bumblebees zipping all over the place but I couldn’t manage to get close enough to get a shot of one.

Want

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Ms. Gracie didn’t boop me until 5:30 this morning. I’m grateful she allowed me to sleep in. If I could get her to let me sleep until 6AM that would be amazing.

The Hybrid React Native/Native app I’m working on is really starting to gain steam. We’ve shipped some new features and have a couple more big ones coming at the end of next month.

I’ve learned a lot about integrating React Native with native code and my learning continues. I mentioned before I hope I can work on this app through, at least, the end of the year. I know we can also improve on native performance, app UI spit-n-polish, and improve the network API to do more with fewer calls. It’s been an amazing project!

Hope you enjoy the links.

Keith Allen and Alisha Ebrahimji • CNN

Louis Gossett Jr., who won an Academy Award for his performance in “An Officer and a Gentleman” and an Emmy for the groundbreaking miniseries “Roots,” has died at age 87, according to a statement from his family.

RIP

Justin Fenton and Giacomo Bologna • The Baltimore Banner

The Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed early Tuesday after being struck by a ship, and rescue teams were searching for multiple people believed to have fallen into the Patapsco River, a Baltimore Fire department spokesman confirmed.

A horrible tragedy for the city of Baltimore and the families of the six men who lost their lives. ❤️

I hope they’re able to learn from the collapse and build in additional safety measures to help avert an accident like this in the future.

Also, why don’t tug boats escort these big ships into the harbor? I’d venture to guess it’s about the money?

Louie Mantia

A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.

I’ve had a blog since February of 2001 — that’s 23 years! — and I’ve never been this inspired to build my own blog completely by hand.

🎙️Decoder with Nilay Patel

Nilay talks to Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky. It’s a really good conversation about tech and community. Recommended

Sara Stewart • CNN Opinion

I don’t want to state the ass-numbingly obvious, but nobody wants to sit through more than half an hour of “content” before the nearly three-hour film they paid too much to see. It defies all logic to expect people to fork over more to be bombarded with ads and trailers they can’t mute or forward through the way they’d be able to do at home — where they can also sit on a comfier couch and eat better food.

YES! I don’t remember where and when this happened to us last but it was so frustrating.

Movie theaters, please, don’t do this.

Juli Clover • MacRumors

Apple’s Phil Schiller Works 80 Hours a Week Overseeing App Store

Major control freak vibe. Who knows if it’s even true but Mr. Schiller should be enjoying some of that wealth and let Apple evolve.

Of course this is why I’m not rich. I don’t have that kind of drive anymore. I did my 80 hour weeks in the early 90’s and 2000’s. I’m over it. I don’t mind putting in extra hours here and there but when it’s the norm to work 60 hours a week, well, that’s just stupid.

Joe Kukura • sfist.com

The winning bid for the up-for-auction Anchor Brewing Company was supposed to be announced at the end of January, but things appear to be delayed, and a company rep tells us “a winner most likely will be announced in late April.”

This still saddens me. Anchor was an iconic San Francisco brewer who made good beer. As with everything else I suppose you have to change with the times or fold. 🍺

Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann • The Atlantic

Donald Trump is determined to avoid accountability before the general election, and, so far, the U.S. Supreme Court is helping him.

The best way to save our democracy and our republic is to vote for Joe Biden, even if you are a Republican. Just hold your nose and vote for him.

It’s also the only way we’ll see Justice applied to TFG. He’s terrified he’ll be tossed in prison without access to his social network, rallies, hair care products, well done stake with ketchup, and orange makeup. 👮🏿

Chris Trottier

If you want to know why Truth Social looks like so much other Fediverse software, it’s because it runs Mastodon with a Soapbox front-end.

I remember the hubbub around Truth Social using Mastodon. It’s nice we’ve defederated it. He wanted a captive audience of wing nut MAGAs anyway.

How fast will the newly minted public company come tumbling down? I’d call it meme stock of the year.

Molly White • Citation Needed

Sam Bankman-Fried maintains that his crimes were victimless and resulted in zero losses, and therefore warrant only six years of imprisonment. Prosecutors argue that 40–50 years are justified.

I heard Scott Galloway on Pivot say Bankman-Fried didn’t deserve the 25 years he got. Why not? Rich people never want their kind held accountable.

Bankman-Fried is young. Don’t worry, he will be young enough when he gets out to commit fraud again.

By Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin • New York Times

Facing an extraordinary on-air revolt by its leading stars, NBC’s top news executive said on Tuesday that he had decided to cut ties with Ms. McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, who was hired last week as an on-air political commentator.

Rachel Maddow was on fire Monday night. She always has the best lead in to her stories. If you missed it, go watch on YouTube . It was really great.

John Gruber • Daring Fireball

A few readers have asked about my speculation that Apple, along with the other DMA-designated gatekeepers (none of which are European companies of course), might reasonably pull out of the relatively small EU market rather than risk facing disproportionately large fines from the European Commission.

Gruber has an interesting take but I think it would be so much better if Apple just did the right thing and opened things up for developers to “side load”, create their own stores, and allow different payment methods.

Keep on providing awesome hardware and the platform developers love and let us help you grow the platform even more.

Look, I’m a nobody who doesn’t make much on the store. If I’ve made $2,000.00 on the store since 2009 I’d be shocked. I’ll continue to use the App Store and abide by the stricter rules because it doesn’t affect me directly but a lot of Indie Devs could benefit by paying way less than Apple’s 15-30%.

That opinion and $10 can get you a mighty fine drink at Starbucks.

Kate Yoder • Grist

But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws.

Florida continues to prove it’s the state with the biggest number of wack jobs in the union. Once that waterfront property starts disappearing folks can just sell their homes and move, right Ben? 🤣

Stephen Hackett • 512 Pixels

With Threads starting to federate, there has been push back in corners of Mastodon, with some server admins blocking users from @threads.net entirely. I think just about everyone has complicated feelings about Meta, but I think this kind of move only harms users of the Fediverse.

I’m going to follow a few few folks on Threads because I enjoyed following them on Twitter and they don’t have, and seemingly won’t have, Mastodon accounts.

If it turns into a shit show I don’t have to follow Threads accounts. Easy peasy.

Gabby Del Valle

For months, Elon Musk has been dropping decidedly unsubtle hints that he believes in the great replacement, a conspiracy theory that liberal elites are “importing” immigrants into the United States, Europe, and Australia to wage political and biological warfare against white people.

Musk is a full on disgusting human being. He proves it more and more with each passing day.

How he’s still the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is beyond comprehension. ☣️

W. Evan Sheehan

First and foremost let me state that this post is not about excluding people from the IndieWeb community. I am not here to be a gatekeeper. Rather, I am trying to call attention to a disconnect I see in how I’ve seen the IndieWeb movement promoted and how the IndieWeb community presents itself.

I agree with a lot of this piece. The IndieWeb is still very immature as a product platform but everything is there to create great experiences. It’s up to us to do it and do it in a way that’s easy for the masses to use.

Well, the Zags fell to Purdue. Not shocking or surprising. They had a good run.

Gonzaga is still alive in my bracket. Getting past Purdue is gonna be extremely difficult.

I haven’t had Chipotle in a very long time.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Kim let me sleep in this morning. I must say it was pretty glorious.

Not too much to report on my work week. Busy, but in a good way. I really love this project. The people and the technical aspects have been amazing. Fingers crossed we get to continue on after delivering everything we had to do in this initial round of work. 🤞🏼

JoBlo

Very sad news today as it’s been reported that M. Emmet Walsh has died at the age of 88. No matter the size of the role, the prolific character actor always made a unique impression throughout his long career, which spanned six decades.

He was great in Blade Runner and I loved his character in Christmas with the Kranks.

R.I.P. 🪦

Peter Bergen • CNN

Kushner’s newly disclosed musings last month that Gaza has a lot of “very valuable” waterfront property reminds one of Marie Antoinette’s purported observation, “Let them eat cake.”

Kushner is a perfect fit for the Trump crime organization. He’s a sociopath just like his father-in-law.

My gut reaction earlier sums it up.

Casey Newton • Platformer

Today let’s talk about one of the most significant antitrust lawsuits ever filed in the tech industry: this 88-page complaint against Apple, filed by the Department of Justice and joined by 16 states, accusing the iPhone maker of illegally maintaining its monopoly over high-end smartphones and artificially inflating prices for consumers.

I personally see some similarities between this case and the case the DOJ brought against Microsoft in 1998.

I wrote about it earlier in the week if you’re interested and pointed out the piece from a Jason Snell article that really caught my attention.

Emma Roth • The Verge

Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself. During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse.

Being the administrator of a Mastodon instance I’m actually excited for this! There are certain famous people I’d love to follow again and my hope is I’ll find them on Threads.

Tim Bray

When I’m away from home, I still want to listen to the music we have at home (well, I can live without the LPs). We had well over a thousand CDs so that’s a lot of music, 12,286 tracks ripped into Apple Lossless. Except for a few MP3s from, well, never mind. This instalment of the De-Google Project is about ways to do that with less Big-Tech involvement.

I really like the idea of this. I have an old Mac Mini I’d like to turn into a media server, most likely using Plex. I’ve started buying Blu-ray’s again for fear of losing parts of my video library at the whim of the corporation I purchased the license from.

Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein • The Washington Post

Lawyers and former judges said they are baffled by an order issued this week by the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s pending trial on charges that he mishandled classified documents — and believe her instructions suggest the case will not go to trial anytime soon.

The sway the Orange Turd has over parts of our government is shocking. I hope she’s replaced and soon.

Ryan Hockensmith • ESPN

How one fan picked the greatest March Madness bracket ever built

This is a fun story. I’ve picked Final Four winners and won tournaments among friends with better brackets, but there’s usually a surprise early on that can make or break your bracket.

Just look at the South this year. It’s a mess and I’m here for it.

Jason Karaian • The New York Times

Unilever, the consumer goods giant, said on Tuesday that it would cut 7,500 jobs and spin off its ice cream unit, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, to reduce costs and simplify its portfolio of brands.

Big corporations continue to make huge profits for shareholders at the expense of the working class. I don’t know if that’s exactly what’s happening here but it feels like it.

HomeGrown

As part of creating the Grow Your Own Services site, I set up my own Mastodon server through a managed hosting service. I thought I’d write an article about this topic, in order to help others considering doing the same thing. I’ve tried to break down the process into ten main steps.

If you have the gumption to run and maintain your own Mastodon instances this article is for you.

Me? I just use Masto.Host.

Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro • Oracle

Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update

This is a pretty big thing to break and I’m sure the DOJ will not look kindly on it.

Louie Mantia

We’ve truly lost sight of how to make good apps. There’s a serious lack of vision and taste in the industry. Everyone’s given in to the lowest common denominator in the design of apps, simply mimicking what others do without understanding if it’s even the right choice.

I’ve been reading Louie more and more lately. I’m glad he’s started blogging because I’ve loved his pieces on his work history, from The Icon Factory to Apple.

Not to mention his blog is fully hand built. That is very tempting to me.

Joab Jackson • The New Stack

After 20 years of development, the open source GnuCOBOL “has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments,” said OCamlPro founder and GnuCOBOL contributor Fabrice Le Fessant, in a FOSDEM talk about the technology.

What a journey! 20 years in the making. And yes, COBOL is still a thing.

[Erika Morphy • TechSpot](www.techspot.com/news/1022…]

The big picture: Job cuts in the tech industry last year were attributed to the need to economize, driven by inflation and a hiring spree during the pandemic. So, what’s the explanation this year, especially when many of these firms have accumulated a significant amount of cash?

It’s been a rough couple years for tech. 😔

KIRSTEN GRIESHABER • The Associated Press

In Germany, the far right is on the rise again. How did it happen?

The extreme right is growing around the world. Both of my grandfathers would roll in their graves if they were around to see this. They both fought to help free us from fascism.

Derrick Bryson Taylor • The New York Times

The former television anchor Don Lemon’s wide-ranging, testy interview with Elon Musk was released online on Monday morning, touching upon topics including politics, particularly the billionaire’s recent meeting with former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Musk’s reported drug use; hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which he now owns; and more.

I watched this and thought Lemon asked some really great, pointed, questions and Musk revealed his authoritarian, racist, self.

Lawrence Hodge • Jalopnik

Lincoln dealers have a big problem. Aside from having just four models to sell, dealers have a bunch of cars from one and two model years ago that they haven’t been able to move.

I admit it. If I could get my hands on a brand new Lincoln Navigator for a super crazy sub 30,000 price tag, I’d consider it. They’re nice.

Six Colors

Imagine trying to sell regular people on the idea that they’d be better off with a bunch of different banking apps implementing NFC payments in random ways, rather than using the Wallet system Apple built.

The bit above really grabbed my attention because if you replace different banking apps with browser apps you have one of the reason the Government sued Microsoft in 1998.

How does this grab you?

Imagine trying to sell regular people on the idea that they’d be better off with a bunch of different banking apps software companies implementing NFC payments browsers in random ways, rather than using the Wallet system browser Apple built.

One of the big reasons for the suit was Microsoft’s dominance in the browser market. They gave Internet Explorer away, as part of the OS, and Netscape couldn’t compete with that.

From a piece on Investopedia from October 2021:

The suit was brought following the browser wars that led to the collapse of Microsoft’s top competitor, Netscape, which occurred when Microsoft began giving away its browser software for free.

Now, if you’re being pedantic Apple never allowed anyone to create NFC payments on their system then decided to make their own. They had one to start with, but hopefully you see the point? Apple does compete directly with the likes of Spotify and definitely has an advantage over them because they own the OS.

I personally don’t care about Apple opening up parts of their OS, like NFC, but I do care about how the App Store works and some of the rules surrounding it. If I were a developer who made his living as an Indie developer I’d want to make as much as I could off of each sell of my apps on the store. As it stands today Apple take a 15-30% cut for each sale of your app or in-app purchases of digital goods. I’d love to see a breakdown of Apple’s expenses related to the App Store vs. income. It has become a big profit center for them so losing any of that revenue would hit their bottom line hard. I’m sure that’s why they’re doing things the way they are in the European Union for compliance with the DMA. Their current plan certainly discourages, and flat out denies small companies, to create their own App Stores.

That’s neither here nor there I suppose. I’m gonna get out some popcorn and keep an eye on how this goes. If the Microsoft case is any indicator of how things will go it’s gonna be a wild ride.

It’s sunny and 70 out, might as well have a good beer, right?

I think Lucky is failing at the whole hiding thing. 😃

Enjoying a Firestone Walker Whistle Monkee tonight. 🤤

I’m a big fan of Stikee Monkee so this beer is a natural fit.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Had a rough night last night and we have our grandkids for the weekend so this post will be brief.

Enjoy!

Herb Sutter

tl;dr: I don’t want C++ to limit what I can express efficiently. I just want C++ to let me enforce our already-well-known safety rules and best practices by default, and make me opt out explicitly if that’s what I want. Then I can still use fully modern C++… just nicer.

C++ continues to improve and grow as a language and it’s nice to see folks talking about safety. 👍🏼

BBC

A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm’s production standards has been found dead in the US.

Apparently he told a friend “if I die it’s not suicide.” Yikes!

This is how conspiracy theories get started

Manton Reese

Today we’re introducing a new feature: blog recommendations. This was inspired by recent interest in bringing back blogrolls, including posts from Dave Winer, his service FeedLand, the recommendations feature in Ghost, and feedback from Micro.blog users asking for new ways to discover people to follow. It’s a way to curate a list of favorite sites to link to from your blog.

There’s a new — old — trend coming to your blogging system: Blog Rolls. The first iteration of this site had a blog roll back in 2001.

What’s old is new again!

Iconfactory

iPulse for iOS/iPadOS literally creates a movie of what’s going on inside your device and updates it every second. You can resize the display to fit well on your screen, or slide it out of the way completely. We were careful to use minimal system resources, such as CPU (3% usage) and memory (only 1 MB in size), while making the video.

I haven’t picked iPulse and I don’t know if I will, but it looks really interesting.

NASCAR

NASCAR Cup Series drivers eager for return to concrete at Bristol

I watched the Bristol race last year at this time and it’s what got me excited about NASCAR.

I wish they’d stay on dirt for the event. It was really fun to watch.

Daring Fireball

App Store WTF of the Week: DealMachine for Real Estate

How in the world did this get by App Review? Heck, I’ve had my app rejected for using the word BETA as an alternate icon name. 🤣

Drew Magary • defector

Derrick Henry Is Here To Remind The Ravens To Run The F*cking Ball

I’ve always liked hard nosed running backs and Derrick Henry fits the bill. I hope he has a great season as a Baltimore Raven.

Ms. Gracie living her best life.