Rob Fahrni

Kitties gonna kitty! We cover the guest bedroom bed with a blanket just for the kitties.

After a few days of gray brother and sister found the sun. 😸☀️

Good morning coffee lovers! Hope you’re ready for some randomness because you’re gonna get some. Cheers! ☕️

Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Thousands of frustrated Texans shivered in homes without power for a second day Thursday, most of them around booming Austin, and fading hopes of a quick fix stirred grim memories of a deadly 2021 blackout after an icy winter storm across the southern U.S.

Poor Texans are, once again, struggling through big cold snap. It’s not surprising though, the GOP run state doesn’t care about people, only profits.

I read something yesterday that rings true: How can you tell when you’re going to have six more weeks of winter? Ted Cruz goes to Mexico.

Folks, stop voting for Republicans. They don’t care about you one little bit.

Ars Technica

HBO’s The Last of Us tries a little tenderness in a surprising episode 3

This was a fantastic episode! We got to see a couple live their best lives under terrible circumstances. I didn’t play the game so I didn’t know Bill was gay but he was already an interesting character up to that point. A prepper with the talent of a gourmet chef and a musician. Being gay was just the cherry on top and his commitment to his partner was heart warming. This episode was a quiet reprieve to what I’d imagine will be non-stop violence to the bitter end.

ESPN

Tom Brady says he is retiring “for good” from football, ending a storied 23-year NFL career during which the star quarterback won seven Super Bowls and set numerous records.

Tom, Tom, Tom. I have a horrible feeling Mr. Brady returned to football because his wife broke the news to him that she wanted a divorce not long after he retired. Football was the distraction he needed to get through it. Now the divorce is final, he’s suffered that initial pain, and it’s time to move on.

I’m so sorry you had to go through that Tom. Divorce is nothing but pain for all involved. I hope you have a beautiful life. You are football’s GOAT.

NetNewsWire

Because of Twitter’s announcement that free access to the Twitter API will end February 9, we will be removing Twitter integration from NetNewsWire in the next release (6.1.1) for Mac and iOS.

Space Karen strikes again! This time he’s hitting anyone whow uses the Twitter API. He’s tightening up while over on Mastodon things remain completely open for business! Following folks on Mastodon from your favorite feed read is so easy you don’t need a special plug-in to do it! It supports RSS right out of the box. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Also, who wants this domain? It would be great for a Space Karen watch site, like Twitter is going great.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Before the present owner, I was a Twitter Blue customer, because I always pay for software—to support its creators and help prevent it from disappearing, as so many great websites and platforms have done over the years.

Jeffrey Zeldman is an American treasure and web hero. I’ve enjoyed reading him for years and years now. This time Jeffrey shares his adventure of trying to give Twitter money. Their payment system failed. Doesn’t surprise me.

America, America

The authoritarian strongman types want us to believe in their power. They may even want us to think that their power is divinely influenced, a sign that they’re not like the rest of us, but better. Look no further than the surreal video released just weeks before the Florida gubernatorial election, complete with Voice of God-style narration and mad text about how Ron DeSantis is the fulfillment of God’s plan for a protector and a fighter.

I’m sure Florida has it’s share of wonderful people but why would you choose to live there? DeSantis is a true authoritarian scared of America’s future without bullies like him. Future America will happen. You may slow it down but it will happen. I hope to one day have a liberal society built on love and compassions for our fellow man, not some nasty place full of scared, old, white men grasping for every little bit of power they can. It’ll happen. May just be after I’m going. Here’s hoping it happens before then.

eFinancialCareers

The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved. Rust got an 87% approval rate in the “most loved” category of the Stack Overflow Survey. However, only 9.3% of respondents used Rust at all and only 8.8% did so professionally. C++, meanwhile, languished at 48%.

Look, I don’t want to work on some web3 thing either. Why would I use my talents as a C++ developer to work on a thing I don’t care for? Sure, you could offer me tons of cash and it would be tempting but ultimately I’d be bored to death.

I’ve worked on award winning Windows Applications and highly performant video encoding and decoding systems. I can’t see working on trading systems. Nope, nope, nope.

NBC News

The U.S. military has been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days, and military and defense leaders have discussed shooting it out of the sky, according to two U.S. officials and a senior defense official.

This is really strange to me. We should bring it down, but in a controlled way if at all possible. It would be fascinating to examine what the onboard package contains.

Who knows, maybe it’s full of radioactive material in hopes we will shoot it down. That would be our luck. 😂

Yahoo!

WESTLAKE, Ohio, January 30, 2023–(BUSINESS WIRE)–TravelCenters of America Inc. (Nasdaq: TA), the nation’s largest publicly-traded full-service travel center network, announced today an agreement with Electrify America to offer electric vehicle charging at select TA/Petro locations with the first stations planned to be deployed in 2023. Electrify America is the largest open direct current fast-charging network in the U.S.

This is excellent! There are so many nice electric vehicles on the market today so setting up a massive charging network makes sense.

The old time car companies have caught up to Space Karen’s car company and in many ways surpassed it. Good. We need the competition.

SFGate: ”Twitter was sued for millions of dollars over allegations of unpaid rent at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday, Jan. 20.”

SFGate

Twitter was sued for millions of dollars over allegations of unpaid rent at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday, Jan. 20.

I’m curious what folks think of the two quoting styles above? The top version is the way I quoted things for years and years, dating back to 2001.

The second is a blockquote. I’ve been doing that more recently.

Which one is better for my blog? 🤔

Miss Priss has decided she should watch The Last of Us.

Today’s NFL Division Championship game picks.

Bengals over Chiefs

49’ers over Eagles

Let’s hope I do better than last weekend. 🤞🏼

Unintentionally did a 3.5mi hike today by taking the wrong fork. Ups and downs, muddy, the works.

Kolby and I are done. 😂

Welp, I’m really gonna need that coffee this morning. Kolby, our puppers, decided 4:30 would be a great time to get up. I was able to ask him to lay down, which means I get another hour, and just like clockwork he woke me up and 5:30. 😀

I’ve done a little poking around my Mastodon timeline this morning and started going through Pocket to see what I was sharing this morning.

First cup down, couple more to go, let’s get started. ☕️

Louie Mantia

All the designers there have a very different taste and style from each other, but they all work together so well. If anything, I felt a little intimidated being the youngest, feeling I might muck it all up. But everyone here was determined to not let me fail. I don’t think I knew what the best job could feel like before I had it.

This is a great piece on Louis time at The Iconfactory.

Louie went on to work for Apple and did the icons for iTunes among other things. After that he started Pacific Helm in San Francisco before landing in Portland to create Parakeet. He’s an amazing designer and if you’re an app creator you may want to hire him to do some beautiful icons for you.

Ars Technica

The New York Times has a report about which divisions are being hit the hardest, and a big one is Google’s future OS development group, Fuchsia.

I check in on Fuschia from time to time and I’d love to see it land on a computing device like Android or Pixel. Perhaps something a bit more powerful, like a web server?

Aeon

This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future.

It would be so much better to invest all that time and resources to saving this planet. After that, please, pursue your conquest of Mars.

Daring Fireball

It’s worse than that, though, because if you were delivered a newspaper with random stories scissored out, you’d know that there were missing stories.

As expected Twitter is beginning to decay. And it has become a bit of a ghost town in my timeline, I do check on occasion, but refuse to post.

The Verge

Asked whether his recent tweets — spreading tawdry conspiracy theories about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, embracing COVID misinformation, mocking trans people, making groan-inducing, jokes, and exposing himself as a right-wing troll — has harmed Tesla’s brand image, Musk responded with characteristic mocking defiance.

Musk is deluded to the point that he only cares about his popularity at the expense of Tesla.

The board should let him go and get someone who can run the company.

AMA

At this point in the pandemic, almost everyone in the U.S. has had COVID-19—whether they know it or not. But something more alarming is happening: A growing number of people are getting reinfected with SARS-CoV-2.

I’ve been wondering for a while if I’m just that out of shape or if COVID did some damage to my lungs. Most likely I’m out of shape but I feel really bad for all the poor souls with long COVID.

Barn Finds

In the pantheon of old Fords, the ’32 coupe and various Model As are always favorites with hot-rodders and collectors.

I’m not what I’d call a car guy but I do run across a car on Barn Finds or Jalopnik I’d love to have. My Dad has a ‘37 Chevy Coup he restored from a rust bucket. I need to find some pictures. It’s a beautiful car.

Smithsonian

Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking.

The Smithsonian is absolutely amazing. I think they need an iOS and Android App for sharing. 😃

Mike McBride

The cost-saving effects of layoffs are almost non-existent. So why? It’s one thing to be losing money and need to cut costs. It’s another to be a pretty profitable organization with layoffs that don’t wind up cutting costs.

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have laid off around 50,000 folks recently. The tech sector continues to take hit after hit after hit.

I know WillowTree is in great shape but this kind of movement in the industry can spread. Here’s hoping we’ve seen the last of it for a while.

David Masover via LinkedIn

I’m the Google SRE who made sure to hand off the pager in the minutes after I got laid off on 2023-01-20. If you’ve worked at Google (or maybe even if you haven’t), you may have heard some version of this story. Here’s what actually happened:

This fella is dedicated. After being laid off he felt the need to track down someone to hand his job off to.

I admire the dedication but Google didn’t feel dedicated enough to you to let you keep your job. Keep that in mind. We’re all expendable to corporations.

‘Sup

More pictures of Flynn can’t hurt, right?

The best way to own your content is to have your own blog.

Sure, Mastodon is open and a great way to share simple thoughts, but you can do that with your blog and echo it to Mastodon or link directly to a post on your blog.

For posts over 280 characters I typically post a link to it, otherwise it’s just a copy of the text.

We got some good family photos durning Thanksgiving.

We have Kim and I, our children, and our grand children.

Kim and I with the grandkids.

The cousins on Kim’s side of the family. It was so nice to have them all together.

Just watched this little feller run across the lawn, crawl in a drain pipe, then run over and hop on one of Kim’s barrels. Good thing she didn’t see him. It’s Chunker, the one that likes to raid her bird feeders. 🐿️

I was terrible with my picks last weekend. I went two for five! Ack! 😵‍💫

It was a real letdown to see San Diego and Baltimore lose. I was happy to see the Giants win. Poor Minnesota, they can’t catch a break.

Here are this weeks picks. 🏈

#4 Jacksonville at #1 Kansas City

Jacksonville has the youth and a great coach but I believe time has run out for the up and comer. I’ll take Kansas City. Easy pick.

#3 Cincinnati at #2 Buffalo

This is a tough one. Cincinnati got some really great breaks as Baltimore did everything possible to lose. Great teams cause havoc.

On the flip side the Bill did their best to lose to Miami but managed to pull it out of the fire.

The Bills were my pick to win it all so of course they’re my pick.

#6 New York at #1 Philadelphia

This one is tough for me. New York has been playing really great football and seeing their NFC rival for the third time this season who knows what’ll happen. Philly should be well rested and ready to roll but I’m going to take the New York Giants as my upset special.

#5 Dallas at #2 San Francisco

While the Cowboys looked unstoppable against the Buccaneers they were playing a not so great team. Tom Brady looked 45 and frightened all night. Heck I’d be terrified of Micah Parsons hitting me. The man is a one man wrecking crew.

Having said all that. The team to most fear right now is the San Francisco 49’ers. Give me the 9’ers.

Good morning! I hope your coffee is strong and you’re ready to read some random links? ☕️

The Iconfactory

While this chapter may have ended, our story is not over. We’ll continue improving our other apps, creating new apps, doing amazing design work for our clients, and posting awesome wallpapers to Wallaroo and Patreon.

Tapbots

We have taken everything great about Tweetbot and used it as the starting point for the future of Ivory.

I’ve been posting on this topic for a while now. Musk is a big caca-doodoo-head and shutting down third-party Twitter clients isn’t a good idea. Why? They’re much better than Twitter’s own client.

Twitter should’ve reached out to these tiny app creators and offered to work with them to include advertising in their timeline streams or offered to buy a few of them and turn each app into a unique client for various Twitter endeavors. Like one that specializes in video and one that specializes in news. Something like that. Give folks more options, not fewer. 🫡🐦

By contrast Mastodon, being a completely open platform, is flourishing thanks to third-party clients! There are so many new iOS Apps for Mastodon it’ll make your head spin. Some have been around for years and have seen a resurgence, others are brand new. They give folks options. Variety, the spice of life!

One other very important point to make. Hitching your wagon to a company that can shut off access at any time was a dangerous move. These indie devs knew what they were doing, but it doesn’t hurt them any less.

I’ve been switching between three very good clients; Toot!, Ivory (beta), and Ice Cubes. Each have something about them I really enjoy, but there are so many more just waiting in the wings.

Also, Musk is failing in many ways. Twitter is a mess and Tesla stock is plummeting. I’m surprised Tesla Board hasn’t fired him. 🔥

Salon

So maybe it’s surprising that any defense attorneys for the Proud Boys have said anything coherent, let alone incisive. Yet right there in the opening arguments, Sabino Jauregui, who is defending Tarrio, went straight at the prosecution’s weak spot: The government is putting the insurrection’s foot soldiers on trial, while leaving the man who led and directed them, Donald Trump, not just untouched by the law but running for president again. (Supposedly.)

To this I say “Duh!” Yes, that slimeball TFG should be in jail.

Here’s hoping Justice is served.

Daring Fireball

The best interfaces to Twitter, on any platforms, were all native apps on the iPhone and Mac. We’re now on the cusp of a new frontier with Mastodon, and it’s Apple’s utterly clueless bureaucratic App Store reviewers who are doing their best to lock the new playground’s gates before they even open.

John is talking about a beautiful, highly functional, Mastodon client called Ice Cubes. The Apple App Store review process can throw some really weird reasons at folks why they won’t approve an app. Stream was rejected three times because I use the word subscribe in it and they thought I was collecting money and wanted their cut. They insisted I use in app purchase for subscriptions. 😵‍💫

Short story long, Ice Cubes was finally approved and I honestly believe someone at Apple read John’s piece and fixed the situation. 💪🏼

stitcher.io

From its humble beginnings as a personal project in the mid-90s, PHP has grown to become one of the most popular languages for web development, powering everything from small blogs to large enterprise applications.

I know what you’re gonna say, PHP is garbage. I don’t think so. It’s been used for years and years and while some folks may find it strange I think it’s a much better language than JavaScript and it continues to improve.

Ars Technica

Legislators of the nation’s least-populous state are taking a brave stand against modernity and climate action. They’re sponsoring SJ0004, “Phasing out new electric vehicle sales by 2035,” an uncomplicated bill that expresses the state’s goal to phase out sales of new EVs by 2035 and asks Wyoming’s industries and citizens to do their civic duty in resisting the EV.

These folks are just ridiculous. When the world becomes so difficult to live in they’ll all ask “What caused this.” We all know what’s causing it. Us, continuing to do things we know are destroying the planet.

Dave Rogers

But I’m conscious of the fact that what I’m doing involves writing; and I have two fears when I’m doing this, neither of which has had the good effect of compelling me to stop. I’m afraid that I’m writing badly, and I’m afraid that it’s boring.

I love reading Dave’s stuff, always have. Like Dave I started my weblog to become a better writer. It hasn’t worked but I still enjoy doing it. Keep up the good work Dave!

Support Indie Developers. That’s it, that’s the commentary.

Sam Soffes

This year was a unique year. I started the year without a job or a place to live. My house in San Francisco just sold, so I had house money in my checking account. Now what?

Great read from Sam. I’d love to become a nomad, traveling the country with Kim and our animal family in a big RV. Yes, id like to make it our full time home!

Anywho, Sam talks about his year of Van Life and it sounds so exciting.

Maybe someday.🤞🏼

Dave Rupert

So you want to make a new JS framework

Web development is still way too difficult. In 2011 I realized most of it boils down to DevOps, not the code so much. We could write, debug, and test code locally but were at the mercy of how the network was configured to make it scale. Yes, we found and fixed bottlenecks in code as we went along, but the DevOps folks were the real heroes.

Go read what Mr. Rupert outlines in his post. It’s ridiculous it takes that much to publish a new JavaScript framework.

Also, why are folks still making new JavaScript frameworks? 🤔

Variety

Regal Cinemas, the second-largest chain of movie theaters in the U.S., will close 39 locations after its parent company Cineworld filed for bankruptcy in September, according to legal filings obtained by Variety.

I love seeing movies on the big screen, always have, but the new realities of COVID-19 have made me a very cautious person. I’ve seen two movies in theaters since the pandemic hit, both at very quiet times for a theatre.

It is sad to see our Charlottesville Regal hit by the closures. It is a really nice theatre.

Me circa 2001, Oslo, Norway.

Let’s see how Mr. Musks management of Twitter is going!

TL;DR - it’s a mess.

The Verge and New York Magazine

Those who remain at the company mostly fall into two camps: people trapped by the need for health care and visas or cold-eyed mercenaries hoping to ascend through a power vacuum.

This piece is really wonderful. Take a few minutes and read the entire thing. Musk is so arrogant and is burning Twitter to ashes one bad move at a time.

Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how ­computers work.”

All that’s missing in that scene is him smacking the lady he’s talking to on the butt then taking a drag off of his cigar and a sip of bourbon.

Dude, I was also writing C programs in the 90’s and I’ve been around the block a few times. When someone is investing valuable time out of their day to explain things to you, listen. Only talk if you need clarification. Twitter is a giant machine with many moving parts. I cannot imagine one person knowing and understanding how it operates. Web services are hard, even little ones. Can you imagine how hard it must be to serve millions and millions of users daily?

Arrogant and not a genius.

Engadget

In case there was any doubt about Twitter’s intentions in cutting off the developers of third-party apps, the company has quietly updated its developer agreement to make clear that app makers are no longer permitted to create their own clients.

The Iconfactory

We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.

A beautiful goodbye written by one of Twitterrific’s long term caretakers. Sean has spent most of his career working on the best Twitter client on the platform. It was ahead of it’s time in so many ways.

It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary.

If anything we need to remember Twitterrific for all its firsts. It made Twitter usable on a mobile phone. It paved the way.

Twitter realized it needed an iOS client of its own, bought Tweetie, and promptly turned it into a user experience mess. Many of us used third-party clients because they were just better.

Flynn loves to cuddle. Tonight’s winner, my foot. 😄

According to Twitter some client applications stopped working because they broke a rule.

What rule? We don’t know which rule they broke. What we do know is what their own Developer Agreement and Policy states.

V. Termination. Twitter may immediately terminate or suspend this Agreement, any rights granted herein, and/or your license to the Licensed Materials, at its sole discretion at any time, for any reason by providing notice to you.

Emphasis is mine. I copied that text right out of Twitter’s Developer Agreement and Policy

The folks at The Iconfactory and Tapbots haven’t heard a word from Twitter. They just had their access turned off.

Craig Hockenberry

What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.

Twitterrific was the first Twitter application. Not the first for iOS, it was the first.

I’ve been using it since the first version built with the official iOS SDK. The original version worked with jailbroken phones, if memory serves?

Of course how can you blame Craig for being extremely pissed off? Of course it’s Twitter’s right to cut off access. The Iconfactory knew that when they built Twitterrific, but to not have the courtesy — never mind courtesy, the guts — to contact all the companies impacted by the change and give them a little runway so they could at least remove the apps from sale and inform their dedicated customers of the pending change.

Twitter’s new owner is a coward and not nearly as smart as everyone thought.

Thank you Iconfactory! Thank you for over 15-years of Twitterrific and all the beautiful software you create.

Here’s wishing you all the best for your next great project! ❤️

You can support The Iconfactory on Patreon or go purchase one of their beautifully designed apps. My current favorite is Wallaroo.

I really wanted the Giants to beat the Vikings but I didn’t expect it to happen, so I was pleased to see them win 31-24.

I was shocked to see San Diego lose to Jacksonville. When it was 27-7 I changed the channel, watched some random series I can’t remember now, and crawled into bed around 2AM. I didn’t check the score until this morning. It was a big shock.

Baltimore at Cincinnati are next. Go Baltimore! 🏈

Ms. Priss enjoying her best life.

I picked up the domain chaosmonkey.party because I’d LOVE to make a site dedicated to the MAGA wing of the GOP.

They are the Chaos Monkey Party, the CMP. Of course there should be a nice logo of a Monkey, a poo flinging monkey (think of the Democrat Elephant or GOP Donkey as inspiration.)

Any web experts want to help make that site?

That lump is Flynn. 😂

He decided Kolby’s bed was enough like a blanket that he crawled under it a few minutes ago. Goofy kitty.

Good morning! I hope y’all are enjoying your favorite morning wakeup beverage, I know I am. My first cup of the magic elixir know the world over as coffee is sitting next to me and it’s delicious. ☕️

I’m not using my “normal” workflow this morning. Instead of using a combination of Tot and the Micro.Blog app on my iPhone I’m using the wonderful MarsEdit from my Mac. Believe it or not, it feels kind of weird to be doing it this way. But, MarsEdit is such a wonderful tool. Happy to have it. Here we go!

Iconfactory

News quickly spread on Twitter and Mastodon that a wide range of third party apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon, and many others had been disabled. Strangely, Twitterrific for macOS continues to work normally. We cannot say for certain why some clients are unaffected, but it seems possible that there is a new (seemingly unstated and unannounced) policy that is only being applied to apps with large numbers of users.

As of this writing Twitterrific is still blocked from connecting to Twitter. Good old Elon, Mr. Free Speech, is being spiteful and blocking third-pary apps from working. It seems it’s only the third-party apps with the biggest user base.

So far Twitter hasn’t explained why they did it. Spite, I’d imagine.

Oh, it’s worth noting that Twitterrific is the granddaddy of all Twitter clients and while working on it the word “tweet” was coined. They definitely made history. Ollie, the little bird at the right, is Twitterrific’s mascot and in many ways has become synonymous with Twitter.

I’ve been a Twitterrific user for years and years and I have enormous respect for everyone at The Iconfactory and wish them all the best. ❤️

Pitchfork

The Grammy-winning rock guitarist Jeff Beck has died, his family announced. “After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday,” the family shared in a statement. “His family ask for privacy while they process this tremendous loss.” Beck was 78 years old.

Another legend gone before his time. RIP Mr. Beck.

The Guardian

Joe Biden said the situation in Brazil was “outrageous” after supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro invaded the country’s congress, presidential palace and supreme court on Sunday, with some senior US lawmakers calling for the far-right figure to be extradited from the US.

Of course Bolsonaro took a page from the Trump Playbook of Stupidity and encouraged his supports to try to overthrow the government. The world looks to the United States for direction. TFG is a real asshole and has put democracy around the world at risk. Both men will get their just deserts someday.

Douglas Hill

In an iOS app, it’s technically fairly easy to also use code written in C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++ or JavaScript. In this article, we’ll look at how to call JavaScript code from Swift using JavaScriptCore. As an example, I’ll go through the steps of adding a JavaScript dependency to my iOS reading app to remove tracking parameters from URLs.

Really nice piece by Mr. Hill. I would love to integrate Read Later into Stream someday and it would also be wonderful to embed Readability JavaScript into Stream to make that happen. It would also help standard RSS feeds because many only include a snippet of the full article text. Having Readability support would allow Stream to parse the text of the original web page so you’d get the full article in the article view. Just one of many things I’d love to so.

Raw Story

The wife of a 2020 Iowa Republican candidate for Congress has been arrested and accused of filing 23 fraudulent votes for her husband, reports Business Insider.

If you want to know what the GOP is guilty of on a daily basis just listen to the things they scream about the most.

Seems they like to cheat at elections, among other things.

Goto 10

So I knew I wanted something different. It turns out that a new OS had been getting a big marketing push: IBM OS/2 Warp. This was v3 of OS/2 and let’s get into its history a bit.

I heard this a lot when I was part of Visio. A gentleman approached me at Windows World in Atlanta one year and said “I guarantee if you port Visio to OS/2 you’ll sell 100,000 copies right away." Apparently he worked for IBM.

We chose not to do it because the market was just too small for us to use precious resources for the port. We did have versions that ran on Classic MacOS, NT PPC, and NT Alpha, but never OS/2. The NT versions were fairly straight forward. The Mac version used a porting kit called Alar. I can’t find any references to it or I’d give y’all a link.

Bjango

In an effort to reduce the final app size of iStat Menus, we’ve been investigating ways to slim down our app icon. It’s currently about 1.4MB, which is normal for an app icon, but a decent percentage of our bundle.

Marc Edwards does a deep dive into app icon sizes and his attempt to scale back the size a bit.

Cycling News

Chris Froome has warned of the long-term effects of COVID-19, arguing that many riders are struggling for months post-infection and highlighting the potential risks to the heart.

Yes, long term COVID-19 is a real deal and it effects young, old, and even the fittest of fit professional athletes. Wear a mask and stay safe out there.

Bloomberg

Apple Inc. is working on adding touch screens to its Mac computers, a move that would defy long-held company orthodoxy and embrace an approach that co-founder Steve Jobs once called “ergonomically terrible.”

I can understand folks saying it’s ergoonomically terrible to use a touch screen on a desktop computer, but occasionally tapping the screen on a laptop isn’t bad at all. I’ve seen many a person do this with their touch screen Windows laptops over the years and they don’t seem to have any sort of fatigue associated with it.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro seems like the perfect Windows device to me. It’s a tablet that can be use with a full sized monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and it runs Windows. I could write code on one of these devices. I can’t do that with an iPad.

Fox Sports

Sometimes, there’s a guy like Stetson Bennett IV, except that there isn’t really, not exactly like him anyway, not when this young man of unassuming excellence had to be a footballing miracle-worker just to become Georgia’s quarterback, never mind everything he’s done since.

I love me an underdog. Now, lets see if Stetson Bennett can have an NFL career. I hope so.

Also, the real Championship game was Georgia vs. Ohio State in the Peach Bowl. That was one amazing football game.

Don Melton on Mastodon

Today is the twentieth anniversary of #Apple’s #Safari Web browser being publicly introduced. That stunning debut happened at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco on January 7, 2003. And, of course , I was there. Here’s what I wrote about that event ten years ago:

Happy Birthday Safari! 🥳 All us Mac loving people owe Don “Gramps” Melton a big thanks for putting together the team that went on to create Safari. Thanks, Don!

It’s the first weekend of NFL Playoffs, exciting stuff! 🏈

Saturday

49ers over Seahawks
Chargers over Jaguars

Sunday

Bills over Dolphins
Vikings over Giants
Ravens over Bengals UPSET ALERT

Monday

And, my upset special for the first round of playoffs.

Buccaneers over Cowboys

Kolby has a rough life.