I had such a rough night sleeping. I didn’t sleep much due to pain and not being able to find a comfortable position.
I’m thankful I had some Hydrocodone/APAP left over from knee surgery. At least it takes the edge off. 😊
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter
Ruth Buzzi, who was so hilarious as the lonely spinster Gladys Ormphby, the lady who swung her handbag as a lethal weapon, on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, has died. She was 88.
I’m old enough to remember Laugh-In and Ruth Buzzy was a hoot.
R.I.P. 🪦
The judge ruled that developers should be able to link to other ways to make purchases from inside their apps, so they could process payments via their own website and payment systems. In doing so, developers should have been able to forgo paying Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases.
Some developers are already making changes to use their own payment system. I’ve read that Spotify is preparing a new release and Epic wants to return to the store with their own payment system. John Grubers hot take on Epic returning is a good read and one I hadn’t considered. I just figured it was a done deal, it might be?
Danish consumers are boycotting Coca-Cola, Carlsberg (CARLb.CO), opens new tab CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen said on Tuesday, noting that the brewer, which bottles the drink in Denmark, had seen Coca-Cola volumes decline while local rivals gain share.
It makes sense that other countries are abandoning American products. Prices are being driven up and who wants to pay a huge tax to buy something they can get locally?
“When we started working on ‘Moving Pictures’, everything came along just so effortlessly,” he continued. “We were well prepared, we’d written all the material, we knew what we were doing. We went in, we got sounds. We did things a little differently.
I’m pretty sure the Rush video for Limelight was recorded during this studio time. I wore that cassette tape out, it was so amazing.
Race and Commercial Breakdown of the 2025 Jack Link’s 500
Total minutes of complete race broadcast: 212 Minutes of race broadcast: 187 Minutes of traditional commercials: 25 Minutes of side-by-side commercials: 36
I’ll be checking this site out after each race this season. The total time we saw full screen racing was 186 minutes, which feels much longer than I recall.
The total commercial time was 61 minutes! An hour of commercials! One third of the time watching the race was commercials. Their side by side commercials, which they think is the cats meow, suck. The commercial takes up most of the screen and we get commercial audio.
I’ve seen action happening on the track I’d love see and hear full screen.
The coverage is very substandard. I hope Amazon does a better job than The CW and Fox. I’m not holding my breath.
Jerry Cantrell lends his voice to a song on the soundtrack to new vampire film Sinners.
It’s a nice little article and we get some insight into the directors mindset around the music for the film.
3 billion users = $15–$20 billion is not real math. It’s just bullshit. The users are only valuable right now because they perform a lot of Google web searches within Chrome. Chrome users also make money for Google by using other Google properties that show ads, like Maps and Gmail. And Chrome encourages users, in general, to use Google properties and services like Docs. If you try to work out how valuable Chrome is to Google, it’s seemingly worth a veritable fortune. But that doesn’t mean Chrome holds any value of its own, on its own.
Before reading this I was wondering how a company who forked WebKit to create Chromium is worth anything? As John points out it’s basically Google Search and Marketing. They also have great online services in Gmail and Google Docs. Read John’s piece he says it all.
Ben Smith and Liz Hoffman • Semafor
JC Chandor likes to joke that you could trade off the viewership data of Margin Call, the 2011 film that tells the story of an unnamed bank’s catastrophic 24 hours during the 2008 financial crisis.
I watch Margin Call once in a while and it’s loaded with amazing talent. Great film. It makes you realize how fragile our entire economic system really is.
Politics
So I guess we’re reaching the point where if you want to remain vaccinated against COVID, you’ll have to figure out how to buy an illegal import from this “dark web” I’ve been hearing so much about.
I’m digging the name Bobby Brainworms. I never ever thought our nation would ditch science for conspiracy theories.
American Healthcare is substandard
My trip to the ER today was a success, in a way, but also a failure.
My hope was I’d get an MRI to better understand what’s going on with the discs in lower lumbar. It’s where my pain is focused.
I arrived, got in pretty quickly, and had a great doc visit me. I explained what was going on and my hope for the outcome of the visit. She listened intently and asked a series of questions I answered.
She explained to me the only thing that would result in an MRI is the inability to empty my bladder, being unable to defecate, or weakness in a leg or legs. That’s it.
She shared that my insurance company would outright reject the MRI because I didn’t meet any of those conditions. She also said “You can pay for it yourself but I don’t know how you feel about a $10,000 MRI bill?” 😳
TL;DR - I don’t qualify for an MRI because I’m just in, at times, excruciating pain. But I can still walk (kind of) and pee and poop. 🤬
So, I got two injections; a muscle relaxer and a steroid. I don’t recall the names. The doc also prescribed a different muscle relaxer than I was prescribed prior because it did funny things to me.
This afternoon by 3PM or so the pain was back to a bearable level. In that regard, it was a success.
The lack of an MRI is a complete failure. Sure, I had X-rays a few weeks back so we know the bony parts are in rough shape, but we have zero clue how the soft tissues look. Do I have a bulging disc, or more? Who knows? The doctors don’t know and the physical therapists I visit won’t know exactly what PT plan I need to, hopefully, feel better.
We live in one of the richest nations in the world and our healthcare industry is driven by penny pinching insurance companies claiming we don’t need certain procedures, even though they don’t know.
One of the questions I was asked by the doctor was “Do you feel like hurting yourself or someone else?”
Think about that for a minute. Chronic pain can really screw with your mind. You get tired of it physically and mentally and just stop caring.
Yes, people commit suicide because of pain and insurance company games; Delay, Deny, Defend.
People also murder insurance company CEO’s because of their crap policies that delay and deny people the care they need.
I said “No” to both questions because I haven’t reached that “I can’t take this anymore” phase. I’m doing ok and I hope I’ll bet an MRI after my physical therapy, but I’m losing hope.
Oh, yeah, this seems to be the way in Virginia. I’ve had MRI’s in California that were never challenged by the insurance company. Maybe it’s because I have a different insurance company now? It’s probably the latter.
If you don’t need a back I’d recommend against having one. 🤣
Off to the ER we go. I’m hoping they’ll do an MRI so we know how much damage there is to soft tissues.
I’m so over the pain of it all.
WTF is he talking about?
Can someone smart please explain what this knucklehead is saying? 😳
How can people making less than $200k benefit from tariffs? Ultimately we pay for the tariff because the poor small business has to raise their prices to pay for the tariff. Right? RIGHT!
Calling Paul Krugman, come on Mr. Krugman. Can you please explain what the hell Marmalade Messiah is saying?
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Yesterday Kim and I were looking at homes on acreage. We’re hoping to find our final home and have enough land our kids could build on it if they want to. It’ll also be the perfect place to setup for the coming zombie apocalypse! 🧟♂️
Hope you enjoy the links.
Aisha Nyandoro, Ph.D. • Forbes
You come into a lot of money suddenly, and it’s like you’ve won the lottery. I had to think a lot about, “what is the purpose of money?” Why do we have money, and how much money is enough? The more I looked at it, the more I thought the money should be actually out there working to make the world better in some form. I didn’t see the purpose of holding on to a bunch of wealth if it’s not doing anything.
There are some extremely wealthy people who are empathetic to the human condition and want to help. See, not all of them are building dick shaped rockets or trying to take over the United States. 👍🏼
For a long while, I’ve felt that the design of iOS is too top heavy. While our phones seem to grow larger every year, our hands do not and so interface elements are pulled ever further out of reach.
Reading tealeaves is not my thing any longer, but this is a really great take on what the next version of iOS may hold for us. 👩🎨
Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology
At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications.
I know a lot of shops really love GraphQL for its flexibility, but I’ve never had the pleasure of working with it. It is my understanding Twitter was using GraphQL for the updated Twitter API that Space Karen scrapped.
In a groundbreaking step for the future of construction, the first-ever 3D-printed Starbucks is taking shape in Brownsville, Texas.
How cool is that? I wish I could’ve seen the machine during the process. You can see the layers in the pictures and see a very visible seam or rib where it came together. Overall it’s extremely cool and it’s supposed to be less expensive than traditional construction. I hope these become options for young folks getting their first home.
This magical DIY Book Lamp teaches kids about creativity and electronics. It combines paper crafting and paper circuits using conductive tape. The materials used are simple, but the result is truly fascinating.
This could be a really fun project for me and my grandchildren.
DESIGN WAS so much easier before I had clients. I assigned myself projects with no requirements, no schedule, no budget, no constraints. By most definitions, what I did wasn’t even design—except that it ended up creating new things, some of which still exist on the web.
This is how I’d imagine most indie software developers feel. I know when I work on Stream or RxCalc or Arrgly or [top sekret project] I find the most joy there because I don’t have to worry about someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m coding thing the proper way. I’m just coding, crafting an application the way I see it. I don’t have to use all these different latest creates frameworks or new patterns. I can be my curmudgeonly self and use tried and true methods of old because I’m the only one who needs to worry about it. 😃
I’ve got a post-graduate certificate in artificial intelligence (AI). I’m also an author, and I believe writers and publishers should not use AI in publishing. So that’s why I was disturbed when a reviewer asked if I had used AI in writing my recent coming-of-age novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun.
I won’t go as far to say you should never use AI, even though I won’t on my personal projects, but you need to understand your craft so you can make an educated decision about the quality of any code you use from a third party. You do this with third party code you get from whatever packages you use, right? Why should AI be any different. In fact AI generated code should get more scrutiny than human written code. Don’t vibe your way to poor quality. 🌹
Nvidia’s GPU drivers have been a disaster over the past four months. It all started when Nvidia released its drivers for the RTX 50-series cards in January, and introduced black screen issues, game crashes, and general stability problems for new and existing graphics cards.
When I hear about something like this my brain always asks “I wonder if they rewrote the driver code.” That could definitely be a huge mistake. I don’t know if that’s what they did or if it was just rushed to get it to market but it’s not good to break something so many folks rely on. Software development is just plain difficult. All the best fixing your drivers, Nvidia!
Yes, AI-assisted development is transforming how we build software, but it’s not a free pass to abandon rigor, review, or craftsmanship. “Vibe coding” is not an excuse for low-quality work.
Ah, I mentioned this above. Check those outputs for accuracy and fix problems so you don’t get bit. ‘Nuff said.
The Sakura might be Japan’s best-selling EV (indeed, strong demand led to Nissan having to pause sales in late 2022 because it had too many orders), but it has the potential to be far more than that. It is the EV that many city EV drivers have been crying out for.
This is a really cute little car that would be perfect for city dwellers. Heck, I drive one these to work and back daily if I could convince my wife I needed it. 🤣 As it is I work from home and need a truck for towing our camping trailer and hauling dirt and rock. (You’d be surprised how often we used to do that!)
Finally got a bunch of tattoos on my laptop. I ordered a case for it so I could keep my stickers and make it easier to cleanup the laptop when I have to turn it in. 😃
What an idiot. 🤣
Captured a good picture of a Snowberry Clearwing.
‘There Is a Complete Meltdown in the Building’: Pentagon Reportedly in ‘Chaos’ as Hegseth Loses Four Staffers in One Day
Who’s a thunk it? 🤣
I mean, you put absolute morons in charge and chaos follows. They are the Chaos Monkey Party, not MAGA.
It all starts with the idiot at the top. Good old Marmalade Messiah, Donald J. Trump.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Sippin’ on my coffee, sittin’ on the couch, typin’ this post out on my iPhone. Like most mornings the house is quiet so it’s a perfect time to write, or post a bunch of links.
The week has been good overall. Work was fine. Pretty quiet. Our Canadian and Brazilian brethren were off yesterday for Good Friday. I suppose that had a lot to do with it, well that and No Meetings Friday. 😃
Anywho, I hope you enjoy the links.
I hope someday we’ll get a version of Swift that isn’t chasing whatever the hot new coding paradigm currently is, and isn’t weighed down by ever expanding complexity. I think that could be pretty nice.
I understand Gus’ sentiment. Swift feels, to me, like a dumping ground for programming language nerds.
Apple had pushed it as a simple language to learn. Sure, the basics may be simple, but overall it’s an extremely complex language, especially all the new Swift Concurrency stuff. Does anyone really understand when to use @MainActor?
I’m behind the curve when it comes to fully embracing Swift Concurrency. I currently have one place in Stream for Mac that uses it, and it’s nice, but I’m not implementing any Sendable types, just taking advantage of Task() and Async/Await.
Get a first look at Daniel Suárez’s Telcel-Infinitum scheme as he makes a homecoming to Mexico at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Sunday, June 15
This is cool! NASCAR is headed back to Mexico! I’d actually love to attend this event but I didn’t plan for it this year and I’m not sure how much Kim would appreciate me going all the way to Mexico to watch a NASCAR race when NASCAR is mainly a south-eastern thing. I could drive 45 minutes to Richmond Raceway if I wanted to see a race. 😃
I still think Daniel Suárez should try to get Papas and Beer onboard. 🍻
After growing up using Commodore and Atari computers, the first PC I bought with my own money (as a college student) was a “Macintari” in 1987. Proper Macs were super expensive, so instead, I purchased a Mega ST series Atari computer, which ran the same CPU as Macs of that era (the Motorola 68000). If you installed a Macintosh ROM (or EPROM) chip, you could boot into Macintosh System Software (as macOS was known at the time) and use the Atari hardware as if it were a “real” Apple Macintosh computer.
I had no idea you could run MacOS on an Atari computer!
If you’re interested in one persons observations about moving from Windows to Mac, this is a good one. It’s interesting to me how much third party software Windows users use today.
I have no idea how muchuva pain it would be for me to go back to Windows. Ive been gone for so long and it’s changed so much since 2006.
Specifically, Schleswig-Holstein is dumping Windows and Office for Linux and the popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice. The Schleswig-Holstein cabinet made this decision not because of Linux and LibreOffice’s technical superiority, but because it values “digital sovereignty.”
This is another way our fascist regime has affected American companies.
On the flip side this year will be the year of the Linux Desktop! 😜
Sister Anita eventually gave up, mostly because she couldn’t make out the chicken scratch that my right hand was coming up with, and I guess she just decided that she couldn’t save us all, and I would be an acceptable sacrifice to Satan. For which I was thankful.
Of course I latch on to the left handed thing. My folks converted me from left to right handed when I was pretty darned young because “The world is made for right handed people.”
The madness started, as baseball madness tends to start, with the New York Yankees: At the end of March, during the opening weekend of the new season, the team’s first three batters hit home runs on the first three pitches thrown their way. The final score, 20–9, was almost too good to be true. And then, everybody noticed the bats.
This is a great read and why we need science in the world. 😃 Leave it to a physicist to redesign, of all things, the baseball bat. Something that hasn’t really changed in well over 100 years. Progress! Hopefully the Majors doesn’t outlaw them.
There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-women flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.
The Blue Origin trip into space with a bunch of crazy rich people definitely seems a bit tone deaf.
At least it didn’t blow up like Space Karen’s rockets do.
Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.
I’ve always been impressed by Mr. Zeldman’s willingness to write about his life. You will find many posts labeled My Glamorous Life where he shares personal life stories. He’s a great writer, technologist, and by all accounts and amazing human being. I wish him nothing but the best. ❤️
Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.
I like this take. I’ve had numerous junior developers say to me something along the lines of “I can’t wait to see what you have to teach me.” Oftentimes that comment is met with a blank stare. 😳 The “teachings” will mostly come organically. I’ve just been around long enough to know how to build software from concept, to development, to shipping, and everything in between. I’ve had great mentors along the way and suffered through issues that seem to crop up in every product I’ve ever worked on. Experience is just age, repetition, and pain, but I do love sharing my experiences of only to help others avoid the pain.
We all know the saying “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan,” but reading a couple new reports about the current inner-workings of Apple, it almost feels inverted at the most valuable company in the world.
All monster companies eventually experience problems scaling up. Oftentimes it’s because they believe that standardization on some methodology is going to save them. Well, that and people.
We’re still going through growing, and transition, pains at WillowTree since the TELUS acquisition. The cultural and systems transitions haven’t been easy on anyone.
Someday I’ll write about it a bit more.
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!
The remodel turned out really nice and it’s great to see them embrace the community by opening the doors for events. John Scalzi is one of those folks I wish I could know personally. He’s just so down to earth I imagine he’d be a great friend.
Forced RTO (Return To Office) is unacceptable, that is no discussion. But please also don’t forget how privileged many of us are to be able to work from home. The factory workers, the people working in grocery stores, doctors, nurses, truck drivers — the majority of the workforce out there — never had this luxury. I have always kept that in mind. They made it possible for people like us to actually be able to work from home.
The forced return to office put in place by many companies has been hard on folks and companies alike. WillowTrees CEO likes to have folks in the office. He likes the buzz and the randomness of bumping into folks. I can appreciate that and I also appreciate working from home. I must give him props for not forcing folks to return to office because he easily could have. ❤️
Would I go back if everyone was required to return? Yes, absolutely. There is a part of me that misses it.
Thanks to the openness of Mastodon and Bluesky, it’s possible to follow accounts across network boundaries.
And that’s the kind of openness that Tapestry, Reeder, and Surf are built on.
There is a new class of software that spans open networks and closed networks. I’ve thought about doing this for Stream ever since I learned more about ActivityPub. Folks can follow Mastodon feeds via RSS so it’s made it less important to write code to connect to ActivityPub directly, so I haven’t bothered.
The fine folks at The Iconfactory have created a pretty ingenious way to connect to any source material you’d like by writing a plug-in to Tapestry in JavaScript! Neat, right? 🙏🏼
Begs the question: What does native mean? 🤔
Last year it turned out that Elon Musk’s xAI had to install additional ‘portable’ generators near its facility adjacent to Memphis, Tennessee, to power the Colossus supercomputer with over 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs as local power grid could not support the load. Now it turns out that these generators were not exactly legal, yet they can keep running, reports The Guardian.
Musks genius is being a narcissist and a sociopath. He doesn’t give a crap about anything or anyone who stands in his way. He and our President are one and the same. Ignore the law and do whatever they want. 🤬
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. 🌞
Ms. Gracie loves the sun.
Don’t come to the U.S.
The European Commission has started issuing burner phones and stripped-down laptops to staff visiting the U.S. over concerns that the treatment of visitors to the country has become a security risk, according to a new report from the Financial Times. And it’s just the latest news that America’s slide into fascism under Donald Trump is having severe consequences for the United States’ standing in the world, all while the president announced Monday that he has no plans to obey a U.S. Supreme Court order to bring back a man wrongly sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The Cheeto in Chief is a piece of garbage.
Trump has lost his mind
In his meeting with President Nayib Bukele today in the White House, President Donald Trump told his Salvadoran counterpart that “home-growns are next” and that El Salvador would “need to be build about five more places” to hold American citizens.
So the president of the United States proposes, on camera, to deport Americans to foreign concentration camps.
We’re approaching a time when violence is going to be the only way to defeat this fascists regime. Constitutional crisis? The Constitution is on fire and his Orangeness is defying the Supreme Court. Law and order are gone, out the window.
If ever there’s been a time to storm D.C, now is it.
Violence is coming.
Ratt
Ratt was my go to metal band of the 80’s. Sure, I liked Ozzy, like everyone else, but I think I was the only Ratt fan in high school. Pretty mellow Ratt here, but I just loved ‘em. song.link/rgtkvkjns…
I’d really love to see Puscifer some day.
I’m watching the recording of the Cup race and just like the Xfinity race Kyle Larson is putting on a clinic. He’s lapping people left and right and he’s putting his car wherever he wants. Wow.
I think my comment earlier about the Cup race being boring was totally wrong! 🏁
NASCAR - Bristol
I’m watching the NASCAR Cup race at Bristol and I gotta say it’s very boring compared to the Xfinity race yesterday. These guys get in a line and it’s like a long train driving around the track.
Those Xfinity cars can be manipulated and move all over the track. These Cup cars are impossible to pass. Their aero packages lose downforce when you pull out from behind a car to pass.
Did you know that Paolo Pasco, the winner of both the 2024 and 2025 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, uses MY APP, Black Ink?
That is so cool! I’d be thrilled to hear from dedicated Stream or RxCalc users!
Inbound RSS as a Protocol
The one that would really open them up is inbound RSS, the protocol that all the other twitter-like systems refuse to support. Want to blow the doors off now instead of some vague time in the future? Support outbound and inbound RSS. Let the trains come into the station and leave the station on a well established protocol. It could be done in a few weeks, really. Maybe the very intelligent and curious people who read this blog would like to take the time to understand what this means and the doors it would open? It’s a way to change the subject from “good idea but hopeless” to “hey we can have freedom now."#
When I first saw Dave mention inbound and outbound RSS I thought he was taking about a mechanism to do threaded replies using RSS so we could have something akin to Mastodon or Bluesky.
I was wrong. He would like to have the ability to not only subscribe to an RSS feed but also populate a social service timeline with an RSS feed. That’s a good idea.
Mastodon or Bluesky could add the ability to have your timeline subscribe to an RSS feed. When that feed changes it could publish the content into the timeline. There would be some intelligence baked in to know if it’s already posted the feed, and I’d imagine some other niceties, but the idea is really good!
The problem is the platform folks tend to say “use our API.” Which makes sense, but most API’s are painful in some way because of authentication or some hoop you have to go through. If the platform natively supported inbound RSS it would greatly simplify the developer and user experience. Let me pick an RSS feed to follow and use it! BOOM! 💥
Dave also believes Bluesky is leading us down the same path as Twitter. We’re all jamming our content into a centralized system. That’s not great. By having your own site with a weblog and the ability to publish RSS and have that content or link to that content published to Bluesky you’re not so locked in. Your blog is the primary source. A source you control.
To date I believe Micro.blog is the best at doing this. It supports ActivityPub so your @micro.blog account can be used as a Mastodon account and show up in your timeline. It also has its own timeline and it’s a full on blogging system. The post you’re reading now is a Micro.blog managed blog!
The other great thing it does is publish to other systems. My blog post text is either fully published to Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky or a link to the post is published if it has a title and goes over a certain character count. I believe this is the perfect solution to the limited character count issue on the various social networks.
E.G. when I publish Saturday Morning Coffee that post goes to this blog. Here’s what it looks like on Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky.
The main source is my blog. It’s then distributed to these secondary sources. Mastodon and Bluesky get links and Tumblr gets a full copy. 👍🏼
Now, Micro.blog goes to all the trouble to connect to those API’s so it can publish to each platform. That’s a royal pain for the team at Micro.blog. I am grateful they support all these platforms, but wouldn’t it be cool if Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr let me, the user, go to a settings screen and tell it to use my RSS feed instead? Yes, yes it would! 😃
Another great post from Dave.
Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature and stable, and well-managed. A better foundation imho to build on than the others. developer.wordpress.com
WHO DID THIS!
You deserve a medal! 🏅
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I’ve been informally working with a co-worker answering questions about building out hybrid native applications and it’s been wonderful. I also had opportunity to work on more React Native to iOS code with another developer. Total blast. It hit all my happy buttons.
All that happiness was destroyed later Friday afternoon, but that’s a story for another day. Don’t worry, I’m fine, my family is fine, everything’s fine.
Without going into details (that’s what the technote is for), Acorn’s file format is a SQLite database, with a simple three-table schema, containing TIFF or PNG bitmaps to represent bitmap layers, and a plist to represent shape layers. Acorn has kept this simple format since version 2.0 back in 2009.
At some point I’d opened an Acorn file in Base, my database editing app of choice, and realized it was actually a SQLite database. Nifty!
Given Gus is the creator and maintainer of FMDB it kind of makes sense. 😃 (I use FMDB in Stream.)
Warning that even the slightest dent, knick, or scratch would henceforth be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that Raymond Pratt, a 54-year-old resident of Chula Vista, CA who bumped a Tesla while parallel parking, had been sentenced to death.
The Onion’s articles, like this one, put a smile on my face.
Google lays off hundreds of employees in Android, Pixel group
I’m afraid we’re going to see more and more of this over the next handful of years.
I’m sure I’m living on borrowed time. Who knows, I may end up working at Starbucks?
I love being a software developer but the new world order is ready to trade craft for expediency. I hate that. I hope I can continue to be a software craftsman.
If I could retire today, I would. That would allow me to focus on Stream and [top secret project] all the time. 😀
Protective helmets were donned and sledgehammers wielded as
Elon MuskSpace Karen critics vented their frustration at the Tesla boss and billionaire by smashing up a disused Tesla bound for the scrapheap.
Oh, how much would you love to do this? I know I would.
Have you heard of the abandoned mall parking lots being used to store Tesla cars and trucks, weird, right? It would be a shame if a pack of drones flew over them and bombed them into oblivion, wouldn’t it?
[Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology Blog]
At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications. This did not happen overnight. In this blogpost, we will cover the adoption of GraphQL at Toast, from its early days to the recent paradigm shift towards GraphQL Federation.
I love the Toast app! ❤️ It’s one of my favorite apps on my phone because it’s darned handy! There are four restaurants we love to eat at but sometimes we’d like to get takeout. That’s where Toast comes in. Their idea to build a generic ordering app was super smart. Love it! ❤️
It’s nice to see how folks build their infrastructure out. Reading articles like this is like reading about a motor rebuild. There’s always something new to learn.
I’ve always wanted to try GraphQL. Maybe one of these days I’ll get a chance at the day job? 😃
Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue
Good! Nazistack needs a mass exodus of great writers.
I need to write a piece with a list of the wonderful writers I follow there, via RSS of course, so anyone who reads this can go encourage them to leave Substack. 🤬
This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:
I’m sure Tim Cook would love to have a factory complete with worker accommodations that drives folks into the ground for pennies a day.
Maybe our new Administration plans to do away with the minimum wage too?
It’s downright strange how little we know about the hacker or hackers who exposed the identities of over 30 million Ashley Madison users in 2015.
I watched a documentary on Netflix called [Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies, & Scandal(https://time.com/6977627/netflix-ashley-madison-documentary-true-story) a couple nights back and it was absolutely fascinating.
As far as I know the person or persons behind the hack have never been found! That is just amazing to me. Their saving grace is they did it for cultural reasons, not for money. After making their demand for the company to shut down they simply delivered on their threat to release the data they’d stolen. No money demand.
It’s worth a watch.🍿
Mitchellaneous: Excellent protest signs
I threw this in here because I love seeing the interesting signs folks come up with for protests. There have been a lot of good ones since Marmalade Messiah took office.
Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have to see their post appear twice in your feed if they’ve shared it in multiple places.
I remember Craig Hockenberry being asked if Twitterrific — long live Ollie! — was coming to Mastodon. He said that The Iconfactory was exploring something different. Something more for the open web.
Well, Tapestry is that app and it was brilliantly executed.
I’m looking forward to what they do with the Mac version. 😍
Oh, one more thing! Hire The Iconfactory to do your design work, I did, and the results were brilliant!
The Iconfactory is one of those wonderful companies in my list of small companies I’d work for in a heartbeat! 🥰
I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?”
Great piece. I’ve met my share of absolutely incredible developers in my time. From so many developers at Visio, too many to name, to the many excellent developers at WillowTree, hi Nish!
I like Matthias’ take on the matter.
David Eaves, Hillary Hartley • Lawfare
In March, the U.S. government shut down 18F, the digital services team tasked with modernizing government technology and services. 18F was perhaps best known for helping the IRS create a free direct-file tax website that makes it fast and free for Americans to file taxes.
This group was full of kind, caring, compassionate, designers, developers, and project managers with the goal of making world class websites for the government.
Folks like Ethan Marcotte went to work there. Yes, that Ethan Marcotte, the guy who created Responsive Web Design. Now think of an entire engineering team like that!
Cory’s right, using an RSS reader will make your digital life better. I’m wasting less time scrolling past stuff I don’t care about and more time reading things I enjoy. That’s a win.
Yep, yep, yep! There are plenty of excellent RSS readers on the market, but I think you should use Stream! 😁
C is the lingua franca of programming. We must all speak C, and therefore C is not just a programming language anymore – it’s a protocol that every general-purpose programming language needs to speak.
This piece will take a little time to read but I really appreciated the technical detail and the authors take on so many things C. Nicely done! 🙏🏼
Last week we explored some Threads compatibility updates, how to find and follow people across the Fediverse, and the progress of the social web beta launch. This week, we’ve got more fixes and updates to share, as well as a painful and embarrassing story that we wish had never happened.
This is Ghosts place to talk about how they’re building ActivityPub support into Ghost. It’s nice to see other blogging tools support open standards.
To my knowledge, Micro.blog, WordPress, and Ghost support ActivityPub. I’m looking forward to seeing more!👻
All of Apple’s services are abysmal
I’ve heard this from so many people over the years. Creating web services is hard. Especially when you’re servicing millions and millions of people, but shops like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook manage to pull it off. Why can’t Apple?
Marmalade Messiah Manipulates Market
Now we know the strategy
- Tariff everyone
- That kills the market and puts a strain on the economy
- Tell cronies and “friends” you’re gonna call off tariffs
- “Friends” and cronies buy
- After all the nasty people have bought announce delay in tariffs
- Make a crap ton of money
The man needs to be impeached, now.
The Musk Files: Everyone Hates Space Karen
Protective helmets were donned and sledgehammers wielded as Elon Musk critics vented their frustration at the Tesla boss and billionaire by smashing up a disused Tesla bound for the scrapheap.
The public art project was organised by the social media campaign group Everyone Hates Elon. A 2014 Tesla Model S was provided by an anonymous donor “to create a debate about wealth inequality”, a spokesperson for the group said.
I am so OK with this! I wish someone here in Charlottesville or Richmond would setup something like this. Oh, heck, even better would be an event in Washington DC to do the same. Right in front on the White House if that is possible.
Go to hell, Space Karen.
Fingers crossed Tesla stock drops enough he gets a margin call.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Val Kilmer, who played Bruce Wayne in “Batman Forever,” channeled Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone‘s “The Doors” and starred as a tubercular Doc Holliday in “Tombstone,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles.
We lost a good one. I’ve always enjoyed Val Kilmer in his roles. My favorite is his portrayal of Doc Holiday in Tombstone but I also liked him in Real Genius, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Saint.
If you were a fan or are curious about Mr Kilmer give the documentary Val a viewing. It’s really well done.
Oh, I also liked his Madmartigan in Willow.
RIP 🪦
Last Tuesday at 1 AM, I was debugging a critical production issue in my AI dev tool. As I dug through layers of functions, I suddenly realized — unlike the new generation of developers, I was grateful that I could actually understand my codebase. That’s when I started thinking more about Karpathy’s recent statements on vibe coding.
I’ve noted here frequently how slow I am to pick up new languages and frameworks. Largely it’s because I have to dig in, get to the bottom of things, and really develop an understanding of how things actually work. The more abstract — or magic — the language or framework the harder I have to work and the longer it takes for me to grok it. That takes time. For me it usually takes two times longer than most people. I’m a dumb redneck who likes computers, I ain’t that smart, so I learn via a lot of head banging and frustration, oh, and persistence and hard work.
All that to say, I love the craft of software development and I have a really hard time with the notion of using an LLM to develop and entire application for me. I can see using an LLM to get past things I’m not great at. Like my current huge struggle with auto layout in AppKit, but not for everything. 🧠
You say ‘city,’ and I’m going to piss myself, and there’s no way I’m going to hide that wet spot just to make you libs more comfortable. I’m going to tell it like it is—for instance, I’m a man, and I’m scared of my own desires, and I don’t care who knows it!
When I think of Conservatives I think of folks who believe they’re patriots, self reliant, tough, and religious.
Often I think they’re none of those things. Being a patriot doesn’t mean wearing a flag shirt or having the Constitution tattooed on your arm or the American flag waving in your front yard.
A patriot is someone who loves their country and would do anything to protect it. That also means being critical of it and standing up for what you believe.
Many Conservatives I’ve met tend to be hateful of others and angry about what others have.
The Onion has a nice way of capturing that. 😃
I’ve been using the recently revamped Reeder on iOS, and after just a few weeks it feels pretty darned close to my ideal way of reading feeds.
Ashur has written a nice piece on his experience with Reeder. It is a very fine piece of software for iOS and Mac and Silvio Rizzi is an extremely talented designer/developer.
He’s taken a new direction with his beloved feed reader. It’s now more broad and can subscribe to more than RSS feeds, which is something I’ve wanted to do with Stream, and The Icon Factory have done with Tapestry.
It’s a new dawn for feed readers. They’re more general purpose viewers now. Expect to see more of this from other readers in future releases.
Also, thank you for the mention Ashur. I’m very grateful for your support over the years! ❤️
Tom Warren and Jay Peters • The Verge
A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event to protest its use of AI.
The world is in such a strange place at this point in history and I hope we learn from it, otherwise we are doomed to complete failure. War, division, and climate change are all huge threats to humanity.
I don’t blame Israel for defending itself against Hamas. Who would? They were attacked by a terrorist organization who wants to exterminate them. We did the same thing after 9/11.
However, I do take issue with Israel attempting to obliterate Gaza and all her people.
Israel of all countries should know better. Jews were hunted by Hitler’s Nazi Germany who wanted to exterminate them. How can they turn around and do the same? 🙏🏼
Elon Musk’s polygonal pickup is a polarizing sales flop that’s missed the billionaire’s volume goal by a staggering 84%. And there’s no sign that things are improving.
Yeah, the Cyber Truck. 🤣
Vojtech Novak, Shubham Gupta, Fabrizio Cucci, Riccardo Cipolleschi • React Native Developer Blog
This release ships React 19 in React Native and some other relevant features like native support for Android Vector drawables and better brownfield integration for iOS.
I hope we get an opportunity at adopt this on the project I’m on at WillowTree. It sounds like a nice step forward for hybrid apps like the one I’m working on.
Last week I bought a 13" MacBook Air in Midnight (24GB memory, 512GB SSD).
After reading this I’m tempted to go with a new Air as a personal Mac. I’ve been one of those die hard must own a MacBook Pro people but seeing a developer I have a lot of respect for say it works beautifully for an app like Acorn gives me confidence it would be a great choice for my less substantial projects, like Stream. 👍🏼
Warner Bros. dropped a new sneak-peek teaser for James Gunn’s Superman on Thursday out of CinemaCon, and it’s mostly just the same trailer we saw back in December, with the same quick-cut looks at Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Guy “worst haircut in the ’verse” Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), a giant kaiju that might be Jimmy Olsen, and more. The difference is, there’s an extra two minutes of footage that might just be the full theatrical cut of the sequence that follows after Superman crashlands in the snow near the Fortress of Solitude — and it’s a long, agonizing two minutes.
Based on the trailers I’ve seen I don’t think I’m gonna like this Superman.
Henry Cavil is still the best Superman. 🦸🏻♂️
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and a range of other online services, is reducing its workforce. The layoffs will impact 16% of staff across divisions, an Automattic blog post published Wednesday reveals.
I feel really bad for Automatticians. They’ve been through a real rough patch over the last year. First all the hubbub with WPEngine, the mass resignations, and now a layoff.
I hope they all land on their feet and Automattic survives and continues to lead the progression of WordPress far into the future.
I’d also like to see Matt Mullenweg loosen his grip on the open source organization so it can lead future efforts. ❤️
Back in 2019 I moved my blog off of WordPress and over to Ghost. In short, I wasn’t happy with WordPress and wanted a blogging engine that felt more like it was made for blogging than a full CMS where I didn’t use 99% of the features on offer. Ghost seemed to align with my values as a writer and a general user of technology, and over the past 6 years, that’s only become more clear that was the right choice for me.
Paying an organization to take care of the servers and infrastructure for your blog is very freeing.
I switched to Micro.blog a few years back and don’t regret it. The team makes sure we’re always up and running and the service and user experience are dirt simple for blogging. Just as they should be. ❤️
I’ve used most Google’s products since the day they were introduced, so it was a great opportunity to see what these products are like for first time users, since the first time I used them long ago, they usually looked much different.
An interesting read on Google’s widely used products and services. Understanding how the Enterprise versions work is challenging. I’ve had a number of odd experiences with sharing documents over the years. Go read it. You may find yourself nodding your head in agreement.
France’s competition watchdog (Autorité de la concurrence) ordered Apple to pay €150 million (~$162.4 million) after finding that its App Tracking Transparency system allows the company to abuse its dominance in the mobile app market. In its decision, the authority says the initiative — which Apple pitches as a way to give users more control of their privacy — harms small publishers and “is neither necessary for nor proportionate with” Apple’s goal of protecting personal data.
Heh, App Tracking Transparency is something I really appreciate as a user but I can see how some App Developers would not like the idea.
At WillowTree we create a lot of what I refer to as “Marketing Apps.” Most large corporations who have something to sell you really need to have these beautifully designed and implemented applications that not only advertise their products but often need an ordering workflow. We do that and we do that really well.
Every one of the apps I’ve worked on is chock full of analytics measuring all sorts of things. The great companies take the user experience data they collect very seriously and make improvements accordingly.
The app I’m working on now has improved dramatically over the last year because the company we’ve done work for studies their analytics. It really can work.
Politics
Johnathan V. Last • The Bulwark
Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.
The United States of America is now a world wide embarrassment that cannot be trusted and has become a laughing stock.
Postpone any trip to the US you’ve had booked. It’s a real mess here.
If you had told me a decade ago that a former president would waltz back into the White House, torch the global economy, slap double-digit tariffs on damn near everything, spook the markets into evaporating over three trillion dollars in a single day, and call it a “booming economy” with a straight face—I would’ve thought it a particularly cruel and poorly conceived joke.
Again. See my first comment above.
Trump and his administration are burning everything down. Morons all.
Of note, Joan Westenberg has become one of my favorite writers. She delivers facts and opinions with a dry wit I really appreciate.
Now as the owner of The Atlantic, she is the quiet superhero behind the current Signalgate scandal. Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who in full disclosure I know well enough to have his email, has rightfully been taking a hero’s tour on media everywhere since he broke the story of having been “accidentally” included in a Signal chat group of the top national security officials talking about an imminent attack on the Houthis, in violation of every imaginable security protocol not to mention common sense.
It took one brave woman to put all the billionaire bros to shame.
Now if we could convince Bezos to sell the Washington Post to Kara Swisher that would be incredible.
