Today’s NFL Playoff Picks
Buffalo over Jacksonville
San Francisco over Philadelphia
Los Angeles over New England
Monday Night Pick
Pittsburgh over Houston
I typically pick the wrong team. These picks are picks from the heart, not the head. 😁
Skip the FIFA World Cup
“Would you have gone to watch the Olympics in Nazi Germany in 1936?” asked Pekka Kallioniemi, a Finnish social media analyst with a focus on propaganda and disinformation, in a social media post on X Friday. “If the answer is no, it’s time to cancel your US World Cup tickets.”
It’s a shame FIFA is a highly corrupt organization. I know these events take years and years to put together but if FIFA had good leadership they’d have pulled the World Cup from the States. Move it to Canada or Mexico, or both?
I love my country but I’m so embarrassed to be an American at the moment.
Elon Musk says that in a week, the new X algorithm—meaning all the code that determines what you see in your X feed—will be made open source.
We all know this man is a liar, right? He’s almost as bad as Marmalade Messiah.
He said we’d have self driving cars in three years. The problem is he said that in 2013. So if I’m capable of doing addition we should’ve had self driving vehicles in 2016. That’s 10 years ago.
The man may be smart but genius he is not. He’s a sociopathic narcissist and a bully.
Go to Mars and leave us alone.
By Glen Owen and Dan Hodges • Daily Mail
Donald Trump has ordered his special forces commanders to draw up a plan for the invasion of Greenland - but is being resisted by senior military figures, The Mail on Sunday has learned
All you Republican lickspittle toadies need to grow a pair and push back against this. We cannot just start taking over countries. I don’t care what your justification is. This is as un-American as anything I’ve seen from any administration in my lifetime.
NATO needs to get involved now and American soldiers need to refuse to carry out these orders.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
This week has been a tough one. Our country is going right down the toilet with the current administration pulling the handle.
They’re just itching for a reason to declare marshal law and the events of this week with the murder of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross puts us one step closer to one of us killing one of them.
At some point it has to stop or we will go down that road.
Curt Devine, Thomas Bordeaux, Allison Gordon, Kyung Lah • CNN
As he approached Renee Good’s vehicle on a Minneapolis street on Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross held up his phone camera and recorded video.
Less than a minute later, he was still recording when he drew his weapon and fatally shot Good as she accelerated.
This whole situation is disgusting and vile. The ICEhole who killed Ms. Good should be prosecuted to the full extent possible. He committed murder in plain sight and we have him on video doing it.
I feel like if Iconfactory brought in that much or sold that many copies of any of our software in one year we’d be throwing a freakin’ party.
Sean is one of the amazing software developers behind beloved titles like Twitterrific and Tapestry. The Iconfactory is full of incredible folks; support staff, designers, and devs. At last count the company is six incredible people working their tails off to produce some of the best software on the Mac and iOS and they’re always struggling to keep the doors open.
Yes, that’s how tough modern software development shops have it.
I wish I were a really rich man. I’d give them a bunch of money, just because.
If you have design or app development needs, please, visit my friends at The Iconfactory and hire them. You will not be disappointed.
Yes, I love this shop so much I’ve tried to get a job there a couple times. 😄 They’ve never had open positions and I don’t think I have the chops to match Craig Hockenberry and Sean Heber, but I’d sure love to work with them. ❤️
I still think Apple should buy the company. Six amazing folks and an amazing catalog of apps in one nice little package. 😃
It is absolutely unconscionable that, as of this writing, X is not only still on the App Store but is ranked #1 in “News”1 and that Grok is the #3 free app. Moreover, there has been—as far as I have seen—no public statement from Apple or Cook about this situation in the days, at least, over which it has unfolded. Probably because it is indefensible. Even, if at this point, they removed X/Grok from the store—which, don’t get me wrong, they absolutely should—the question would be “what took so long”?
I reported X for child porn at the App Store yesterday and you should too. Space Karen is a disgusting human being and everything he touches turns to amoral shit.
Toss their software out of the store until they fix it, Mr. Cook. You’re one of the largest most profitable companies in the world. Get off the MAGA train. 🤬
The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”
Indeed. What are we supposed to do now? As of this writing I’m 58 years old with no hope of retirement and I’m in an industry going through a radical transformation because of LLMs. They’re damned useful today. What happens when/if they become useful enough I’m no longer needed?
As it stands that day hasn’t come. Humans still need to look over LLM work to make sure it’s correct. Use for everyday things is not trustworthy because it still makes stuff up. But, for software development is pretty darned good.
Every day I expect to be laid off. No, that’s not an exaggeration. I think about it every darned day and I hate it.
I only hope I can find a job when that happens. Being older doesn’t help.
There’s alway Starbucks. ☕️
Before social media ate the internet, and before the internet ate everything else, and before everything else ate itself, blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages. It could be rigorously researched or entirely speculative. It could build an argument over weeks or months, with each post serving as a chapter in an ongoing intellectual project that readers could follow, critique, and respond to.
I love Joan’s writing. She’s so thoughtful and her writing is clear and often resonates with me. This piece is no exception. It’s excellent and you should read it. She has an RSS feed, as any great writer should have. Go subscribe now. 👍🏼
Jason Poitras • IntelliCAD Technology Consortium
AutoLISP® is often used to solve practical problems in CAD workflows, with small custom commands that save time and reduce repetitive work. What has traditionally been missing in IntelliCAD is a modern, developer-friendly way to write and debug those scripts. With IntelliCAD 14.0, the new VLISPcommand introduces a Visual LISP–style debugging workflow using Visual Studio Code, powered by the IntelliCAD LISP Debugger extension.
How cool is this? This is going to prove to be extremely useful for IntelliCAD LISP developers. They’re as close to a full IDE without writing an IDE as one could get and they’re leveraging extremely popular open source tools like. VS Code.
Oh, and they have an existing, built in, IDE that’s one of the best ever built: Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA. It’s an add-on developers dream platform. 😀
Kauy Ostlien • Daily Downforce
Brad Keselowski is set to miss the 2026 NASCAR Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium, following an injury suffered during the offseason, per a new report.
This is a bummer but I hope to see Mr. Keselowski healthy and ready to roll for Daytona.
I also like that they tapped Corey LaJoie to drive the 6 for The Clash at Bowman Gray.
If Mr. Keselowski isn’t ready for Daytona I’m curious to see how Mr. LaJoie fairs given the great equipment he’ll have. He’s always wanted to race in better equipment. Now may be his chance! 🚙
Nielsen’s post on MacOS 26 Tahoe’s tragic “icons for every menu item” design edict was published a month ago, before Nikita Prokopov’s post on the same subject yesterday. Both posts are crackerjack good, and complement each other. Nielsen makes the point that the Mac stood as a counter to platforms and systems that put icons next to every menu item. Of course Google Docs has icons next to every menu item. It sucks. Google sucks at UI design. We Mac users laugh at their crappy designs.
Tahoe’s design continues to be dragged through the muck. I don’t blame all the longtime Mac experts for being pissed off. Some developers are ignoring the new guidance and I don’t blame them for doing it. When someone uses your software and finds it messy, even if it’s the recommended way, they don’t see it as an Apple problem. They see it as the developers problem.
Leaks from Apple’s supply chain have begun to strongly suggest the shape and size of the product we’ll call, for lack of a better name, the iPhone Fold. And since it’s likely going to be nine months before anyone holds one of these things in their hands, this seems like as good a time as any to consider the story Apple is likely to tell when it’s selling this device.
Whoa! While I don’t consider myself the target user for this device, I really do not like this form factor. It’s way too wide for my taste. It’s definitely more iPad than iPhone in my view.
Of course that mockup may not be anywhere close to the real design. I, for one, hope it isn’t. 🤞🏼
Happy New Year! Ready for a productive 2026? We have just the thing: we’re pleased to share that a major upgrade of OmniOutliner is ready for you today!
Omni Group is another premier Mac and iOS shop and it’s really nice to see them release updates to their incredible software.
Congratulations! 🥳
David Harbour explained how he and pretty much everyone else was caught off-guard by the popularity of season 1. “By the time we finished, we wrapped, I thought we wouldn’t get a second season,” he said. “We’d be the first Netflix show kind of ever to never get a second season. We thought no one would watch it, it was going to be a disaster.”
Wow. They thought it would be a flop and it becomes one of the most beloved shows Netflix has ever created, thanks, in part, to Mr. David Harbour.
Liz Sawyer, Andy Mannix and Sarah Nelson The Minnesota Star Tribune
Star Tribune identifies ICE agent who fatally shot woman in Minneapolis
Jonathan Ross was dragged in a separate incident last year by a fleeing driver, according to court records.
Jonathan Ross, you’re a murderer.
A Murder in Minneapolis
But I want to add another note. The main footage here comes from bystander Caitlin Callenson. Here’s her full 4m:25s footage, uncensored, hosted — with credit, and I hope, permission — on the YouTube account of Minnesota Reformer. Be warned that it shows Good being shot to death (albeit sans gore), and contains many loud profanities. This is very good and clear footage. It is difficult viewing but you should watch it. Callenson was very close to Good’s vehicle. I’d say about 30 feet or so. You can see why she thought to start filming before the murderous agent drew his gun and fired.
Go watch that video. When the ICEholes get out of their vehicles you can hear Ms. Good tell them “go around.” One agent approaches aggressively and tries to open the door. The other one is saying something but it’s hard to make out.
Then the asshole agent shoots her on the face. Once he does that he walks to the SUV, checks it out, turns around and walks away, ultimately LEAVING THE SCENE.
That man needs to get out of this kind of work if he’s that afraid.
He also needs to be brought up on murder charges, which he won’t, because the Trump administration is full of sissies who must’ve been bullied on their grade school playground so they hate everyone and have to carry a gun to feel safe.
Goodbye RetroSnap 😔
In an email today from RetroSnap. (This site for this link may disappear soon.)
Alex here, founder at RetroSnap and the geekiest geek of retro gadgets. You may be receiving this message as part of a store-wide notification. If you have already received your order, please disregard this email.
We’re writing to share an important update regarding our store.
Due to recent increases in international import tariffs and related cross-border compliance costs, we’ve been forced to make the difficult decision to close our store and discontinue operations. These tariff changes are outside of our control and have made it impossible for us to continue operating sustainably. Please note that our business email will also be deactivated shortly.
So, I ordered one of these for Kim in early December, for Christmas. It still hasn’t arrived and I was really worried it wouldn’t get here, but I just checked and it’s due in Richmond, VA today. That’s a relief.
Also, thanks you damned Jackass in the White House whose last name rhymes with Dump. Those tariffs have been a real boon to the economy, right? 🤬
Jackass.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Sorry I missed last weekend. I had the flu and it really kicked my butt. When Kim got up on Saturday morning I went back to bed and slept until 4:30 that afternoon. I needed it. I was wiped out. Sunday was even worse. I felt completely disconnected from my body. Really fuzzy brained, fever, chills, achy, and a lovely cough. That lasted for most of the week. I started feeling more myself on Thursday. Of course I’m back to work on Monday. 😂 I’m grateful I had the week to recover.
I hope you enjoy the links!
Carly Thomas and Abid Rahman • The Hollywood Reporter
James Ransone, the versatile character actor best known for his roles in The Wire, Tangerine, Generation Kill, It: Chapter Two and The Black Phone, died on Dec. 19. He was 46.
This really bummed me out because I thought Mr. Ransone was an incredible actor. It’s not mentioned above but my favorite character of his was Deputy So and So in Sinister.
RIP Deputy So and So. 🪦
You should probably leave Substack. Here’s why and how.
Yes, you should 100% leave Substack. I can list so many amazing journalists who’ve created their presence on Substack. They don’t say they’ve created a blog, no, they say they’ve created a Substack which makes it even worse. They’re just blogs and, unfortunately, Substack created an environment attractive to writers because it has everything they need; a place to write, social features, and a way to make money doing it. All without lifting a finger to maintain servers or collect money from paid subscribers. It was smart of the founders, but it turns out the founders support some pretty disgusting people, like Nazis.🤬
Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second).
Isn’t this incredible? It’s so difficult to wrap your brain around the idea that a black hole is traveling through space at that speed, creating a wake, and creating new stars as it goes. Just fascinating!🖤
While the JavaScript language didn’t ship publicly until that September and didn’t reach a 1.0 release until March 1996, the descendants of Eich’s initial 10-day hack now run on approximately 98.9 percent of all websites with client-side code, making JavaScript the dominant programming language of the web.
Much to my chagrin JavaScript has become the de facto language of the web. At one time I’d hoped Common Language Infrastructure would become the way of the web, but it didn’t happen. Instead we got WebAssembly, which is fine, I just wish it had been CLI. It would’ve been great to be able to write code in C# or F# or whatever language supported CLI. JavaScript could’ve been CLI compliant.
It is what it is and if you want to do web, you gotta do JavaScript. ☕️
Jim Beam, which is one of the largest makers of American whiskey in the world, is planning to shut down production in Happy Hollow in Clermont Jan. 1 through 2026.
Y’all can thank President Orange for this. Canadians have decided they don’t need to purchase American made Bourbon any longer and it’s hurting American Bourbon makers.
That’s not political. That’s just bad business.
With podcasting pivoting to video this year, the word used to describe an audio-only show is becoming meaningless.
Nope. Podcasting is still its own thing. It’s open, distributed via RSS, and all about audio. Now, perhaps I’m misguided with that third assertion? RSS is built to deliver any media type as an enclosure but it’s mostly been used to deliver podcasts.
Besides, how many podcasters with video casts use anything other than YouTube for distribution? I think it’s safe to say very few, if any.
Podcasting, like blogging before it, was created to be an open ecosystem. Sure, go ahead and monetize your podcast, but don’t lock it behind a special service that only supports a proprietary distribution mechanism. That is not podcasting, nor should it be used for the video version of it. Whatever that’s called. Calling it a Video Podcast may be the right thing to do, but being distributed via RSS is partly what would allow using the name Podcast for it.
Katherine Legge used the momentum from her run at the 2024 Indianapolis 500 with Dale Coyne Racing to expand her career into NASCAR in 2025, and with the support of her sponsors, the Briton is keen to make a return to the Speedway.
I like Katherine Legge. She’s a very versatile driver who’s competed in the Indy 500 and NASCAR Cup Series races. I just wish she could find a full time NASCAR Cup ride. Last year she ran a few Cup races with backing from E.L.F. Cosmetics and I’d love to see them or another woman focused brand step up to give her the ability to run full time. She has what it takes, she just needs money, better equipment, and manufacturer support, like all other drivers. 😀
Maybe a new Dodge Cup team would be interested in having her full time. It would be really great to see! 🤞🏼
Here are the main changes introduced in Lua 5.5. The reference manual lists the incompatibilities that had to be introduced.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Lua, don’t know why. I just like how compact it is and how easy it is to include as a scripting language in other codebases. One of our junior developers at Pelco developed a tool for that allowed a developer to build media pipelines, using our custom media pipeline framework, by writing Lua instead of C++. It was all hosted inside a custom Qt app. It was a great tool mostly because Lua was easier to write and definitely improved developer experimentation and testing velocity. Not to mention the usefulness to the test team. 🧰
Christopher Goffard • Los Angeles Times
Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well.
This is absolutely fascinating but we’ll never really know the truth of either case.
Perhaps Mr. Barber hit the nail on the head but it sure seems unlikely given the time they’ve gone unsolved and lack of a living suspect to verify it, assuming they’d confess.
Too many bugs. Too many changes. Too little control. Windows 11’s reputation might be at its lowest it’s ever been as 2025 comes to a close.
This is a real shame. I cut my teeth as a software developer on Windows and the Windows API. I owe my career to some amazing Windows developer who took me under their wing and taught me how to use those APIs to great effect. After all these years as an iOS developer I still believe I know the Windows API better than I do Cocoa.
I’d really love to see Microsoft put together a small team dedicated to unifying the user interface design and usability of Windows. Eliminate some old cruft and make it rock solid. The underlying foundation is so good to build on.
Embracing C# or Rust to do more work would be nice but there is a ton of C code to maintain and enhance and they need to transition all of Windows to using WinUI 3.
Perhaps they could start by replacing the React Native Start Menu with a brand new Rust based version? That would make for a good start.
Still Plugging Along
I’m mostly well now. I still have a cough that’s working hard to get those last remnants of irritation out of my lungs but I’m mostly whole. 🤧
I made it to the coffee shop this morning because I really need to work on Stream. It’s been three or four weeks since I’ve been able to work on it and I miss it.
I have lots of thoughts swirling around in my pea brain this morning. Mostly around a strong desire to retire. Retire from working for someone else, not retire from working. At this time of the year I always think about what it would be like to work on my own stuff full time. Stream and top secret project would get so much attention. I looked at top secret project last week for a moment and realized it’s been over a year since I touched the code. That didn’t seem possible but the dates don’t lie. My brain though it had been a few months, not over a year. It was a shock to the system. I’m not gonna be here forever and someday I may not want to write code any longer. Who knows? I certainly don’t. The way I feel about things now I can see writing code until I drop dead behind my keyboard. Someone finding me face down, my computer in some weird state from my face unintentionally issuing a command. 😄
Of course, as it stands today, I still need a job and I’m very happy to have one.
Oh, sorry for missing Saturday Morning Coffee yesterday. My body needed the sleep. I managed to sleep until 4:30PM and still sleep last night. I’m still tired this morning. This darned bug took it out of me.
No, not there
That kind of bullshit is why I’m starting this Substack. To call this moment what it is, to track the erosion of democratic guardrails in real time, and to build a community of people who are sick to death of Trump and ready to fight back. - George Conway
I didn’t link to his piece because he posted on, of all places, Substack.
That’s the last place anyone should post if they’re all about democracy because Substack has a history of supporting Nazis. Yes, Nazis.
George, if you’re serious about democracy you should probably find a better place to write because what I see is a pure money play, not a man trying to save democracy.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Gracie decided 5:30 was wake-up time. I felt miserable. I’m definitely sick. Anywho, I started working on Saturday Morning Coffee and as soon as Kim woke up, I went back to bed. That’s why this is so late. I woke up around 11:30 and had to take care of some stuff.
Sorry for the lateness but I hope you enjoy the links.
Five days ‘til Christmas! 🎅🏼
The world knows Rob as a generational talent, a storyteller and humanitarian activist who made a difference with his art, his voice, and his influence. I knew that man, but I also knew a man who treated me with more kindness, care, and love than my own father ever did. And it is the loss of that man that is piercing my heart right now.
The death or Rob and Michele Reiner was a complete shock. I can’t imagine how hard it hit their close friends and family. Wil gives us some clue of what that loss feels like.
I also like that he was able to share his thoughts and feelings on his own terms. No reporters involved. Just a man telling how he wanted to. ❤️
Kate Mothes • This is Colossal
When an oval-shaped portrait fell into his hands, with its structural framework crumbling and its canvas stained, that wasn’t even the worst of it. This particular painting had also been unskillfully painted over to freshen it up, despite—as Baumgartner discovers—the fact that the “fix” actually completely changed the entire feel of the work. As he works, he illuminates how the amateur attempt to restore the work actually eliminated the subtle nuances of the artist’s original intention, and by extension, the sitter’s personality.
This video was a really great watch. Watching someone at the top of their game is a real treat and when he was finished the painting looked incredible.
Take a few minutes out of your day to watch it. It’s really good. 🖼️
WordPress Studio simplifies all of that.
The free, open-source tool lets you spin up local sites quickly, share previews instantly, and move changes between environments without the usual hassle — helping you focus on creating rather than configuring and troubleshooting.
Tooling makes a huge difference when it comes to managing a large group of systems.
I’d love to see this driven by a real pro.
I’m old enough to remember when the head of Netflix wasn’t just downplaying the importance of movie theaters to the industry, he was eviscerating the entire concept as “outdated”. That is to say, I’m at least eight months old.
I hope Netflix puts an effort behind making top notch movies and lets HBO focus on creation of great series.
In the 16 years that I’ve been writing for MacStories, I’ve seen my fair share of new apps that have come and gone. Apps that promised to revolutionize a particular segment of the App Store were eventually acquired, discontinued, or simply abandoned. It’s been very unusual to witness an indie app survive in a highly competitive marketplace, let alone to find one that thrived after having been sold twice to different owners over the years. But such is the case of Unread, the RSS client now developed by John Brayton of Golden Hill Software and the recipient of this year’s MacStories Selects Lifetime Achievement Award.
Congratulations, John! You earned it. Unread it a top notch feed reader. 🥳
The account itself was flagged as “closed in accordance with the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions.” Naturally, there were repercussions that did a lot more to Dr Buttfield-Addison’s digital life than simply the closure of one account.
Some good news to report. Dr. Butterfield-Addison has regained full access to his account.
It took a Herculean effort to get this account unlocked. Normal folks, like most of us, don’t stand a chance of getting our account back. 😔
Philip Rivers was competent on Sunday but not much more in his first NFL game since the 2020 season.
Let’s hear it for the old guys of the world. I always liked Phillip Rivers. He has a real drive to win and is tough as nail.
Charlottesville Weather
I know I’ve said this many times but the weather in Charlottesville is completely unpredictable. It can be 30F and snowing and 80F and sunny the next.
When I got up with the dogs this morning it was 13F. According to our forecast it’s going to be 60F and sunny Christmas week.
It’s been cold and snowing off and on for a few weeks now. I was hoping for a white Christmas, instead it’s gonna be warm and sunny. 🤣
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Richard MacManus • The New Stack
Thirty years ago, Netscape engineer Brendan Eich famously created a new client-side scripting language in just ten days. It was initially called Mocha, but by the end of the year it would be renamed JavaScript. In 1995, nobody could’ve predicted that JavaScript would become the world’s most popular programming language. But that’s exactly what happened.
JavaScript is most definitely the defacto standard for app development in the browser and it’s used heavily on the server, desktop, and mobile app development. Incredible.
I’ve said for years and years JavaScript is to the browser what C once was to the desktop. Nowadays most folks refer to browser apps as desktop apps, which can be confusing to old timers like me. 😄
If you go see Zootopia 2 this weekend, I’m in the credits, way towards the end, in the technology section.
Congratulations, Lucien! Great Mac developers still exist in the world and Lucien is one of ‘em. Keep on keeping on! ❤️
The work is finally done for the worst selection committee in the College Football Playoff’s dozen-year history, and there are only two ways to explain the grotesque, odious bracket that it belched out Sunday.
I found this upsetting as did many others, but I have to believe that picking the team to leave out was a miserable task. I really hope this wasn’t some kind of political thing because Notre Dame is an independent.
Throughout my morning, I hadn’t visited a single source website directly. I hadn’t refreshed anything manually. Everything had just appeared, delivered automatically from each source to the app I’d chosen to read it in. My information diet runs on feeds.
Sure, I’m a bit biased, but feed readers are the way to go if you like reading the news. The idea of it coming to you without thinking about it is just plain nice.
I know newsletters have become all the rage. A feed reader gives you the same capability.
So my question is this: Why vibe code with a language that has humanconvenience and ergonomics in view? Or to put that another way: Wouldn’t a language designed for vibe codingnaturally dispense with much of what is convenient and ergonomic for humans in favor of what is convenient and ergonomic for machines? Why not have it just write C? Or hell, why not x86 assembly?
That’s not a bad idea! Just vibe code in the most efficient language. Hopefully the code is safe and easily readable. I’d imagine at some point a human may want to do some work on it. Maybe I’m being naive. Maybe the LLM would own it and always be used to modify it? 🤔
San Francisco’s iconic cable car system is both the world’s oldest and the only one still operating, but that doesn’t mean that the cable cars themselves are all vintage. As working transportation vehicles constructed largely of wood, they have a limited lifespan and periodically need to be rebuilt, and new ones even have to be built from the ground up.
This is one of those craftsman jobs I think is really interesting and would be extremely satisfying. 🪚
The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead.
It’s not too late! They could easily fire up an instance of Mastodon or build ActivityPub directly into their tools.
The easiest route is to start a Mastodon instance. How does nytimes.social sound? 😀
What can be written about Gotham that hasn’t already been published? The typeface, commissioned by GQ Magazine in the early 2000s, is now so ubiquitous it has become part of the visual landscape and can be seen all over the world from Manhattan to Melbourne, Bangkok to Buenos Aires.
What is time? It doesn’t seem like it was created that long ago. It really is a beautiful font.
When it was completed in 1868, this lovely little survivor was not designed to stand out. It may have been built as an outlier, but it was likely part of a row of identical houses meant to appeal to upper middle class buyers enriched by the city’s gangbusters post-Civil War economy.
I want this place. I’d remodel the inside and consider putting a coffee shop in the bottom floor.
I would definitely need an elevator. 😃
In-N-Out Burger has quietly removed the number 67 from its order ticket system after repeated chaos caused by teenagers reacting to the viral “6-7” trend, employees and customers say.
Kids today.
Our grandkids drive us a little nuts with this, especially our grandson. 🤣
Discover a unique collection of laptops adorned with creative stickers from around the world. This project celebrates the art and culture of laptop personalization each laptop tells a story through its stickers and gives us a glimpse of the personality of the owners.
I absolutely love this website and need to submit a picture of mine. 😉
Thanks, Jason.
I’m outside putting up Christmas decorations and it’s cold, 35F (2C), but I really am enjoying it. I’ll take this over 80F with 80% humidity any day.
It reminds me of being a kid in the San Joaquin Valley of California on days with dense Tule fog.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I’m a bit late today. I had everything well in hand but something came up we needed to tend to. All is well. ❤️
HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Dec. 5, 2025 – Today, Netflix, Inc. (the Company) and Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (WBD) announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Netflix will acquire Warner Bros., including its film and television studios, HBO Max and HBO.
I’m glad Netflix is going to land Warner Bros. instead of Paramount. It’s not a done deal and apparently Paramount may try a hostile takeover, not to mention David Ellison’s daddy loves to please Marmalade Messiah.
Here’s hoping if anyone is able to acquire it, it’s Netflix. 🤞🏼
Alan Dye may have left for a more lucrative offer from Meta, but this is absolutely a good thing for Apple, which also benefitted from “losing” Jony Ive.
There is certainly no love lost for Dye in the Apple Developer / Designer ecosystem. I plan on making another post on the subject but this was a major story so I had to share it.
TLDR: Bun has been acquired by Anthropic. Anthropic is betting on Bun as the infrastructure powering Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, and future AI coding products & tools.
Bun is a standalone JavaScript runtime and from what I’ve read it’s really good.
Bun was built as a ready to roll replacement for node.js and other tooling for the React community.
It makes me wonder how well it would fit into existing browsers, or new browsers, as a JavaScript engine?
It’s written in Zig which I’m seeing used in more and more places. While it’s not a memory safe language it currently provides better memory safety than C and C++.
A masked bandit terrorized an Ashland ABC store over the weekend, smashing multiple bottles of bourbon before passing out drunk on the bathroom floor.
This is such a funny story. I’ve never heard of a Raccoon going on a bender, but here we are. 🦝
The marketing team at ABC is genius! They created a Raccoon Recommends board of all the booze it drank. 🤣
Sergiu Gatlan • Bleeping Computer
Microsoft has confirmed that the KB5070311 preview update is triggering bright white flashes when launching the File Explorer in dark mode on Windows 11 systems.
I know Windows always gets a really bad rap but I still believe it’s an industry strength operating system.
However, what are y’all doing? If something isn’t ready, please don’t ship it. I mean, there’s minor stuff we’ve all shipped, but this doesn’t seem very minor. Data destroying? No, but it definitely affects the usability of the OS.
But the spike in cancer-causing pollution wasn’t just the fault of local farms, as Doherty expected. It had its roots in a 10,000 square foot data center by the commerce giant Amazon, which first went online in Morrow County in 2011.
Data centers are the new chemical companies. Time for regulations around water use.
Sarah Barshop, Brady Henderson • ESPN
The parting of ways became official in March, when the Rams released Kupp, who had two seasons remaining on the contract extension he signed in 2022. A few days after he was released, he signed a three-year, $45 million deal with the Seattle Seahawks.
I never thought the Rams would jettison Kupp. The man is an incredible football player.
I am happy to hear he landed with the Seahawks. Great city!
His comments immediately drew backlash and sparked debate about the validity of Beckham’s point. While professional athletes have a history of going bankrupt, even after amassing millions in career earnings, $100 million should be enough for anyone to make last.
Uh, yeah. I’m pretty sure I could live like a king for the remainder of my life on 1/8th of that income.
I’m not sure what kind of home he bought for his Mom, but even if it was a $1mm dollar home that still leaves the man with plenty of dough.
This coming from a man who can’t retire because of poor financial choices. 🤪
The Indian government has ordered Apple and other smartphone manufacturers to pre-install a state-owned “security” app on all phones before they are sold to users.
Apple has had to do strange stuff in other countries before. Like giving the Chinese government the keys to iCloud in China.
They’re gonna fight the request.
Zenae Zukowski • Metal Insider
Severing ties with a close one, even family, is never easy, and Chevelle’s Pete and Sam Loeffler know that pain well. The brothers haven’t spoken to their sibling and former bandmate Joe Loeffler since parting ways with him in 2005.
I had no idea that things ended this badly between the Loeffler brothers. It’s a big loss. I hope Joe is happy and doing well.
Francis Bouvier • Lightpanda Blog
To be honest, when I began working on Lightpanda, I chose Zig because I’m not smart enough to build a big project in C++ or Rust.
I don’t really believe this fella is not smart enough to learn C++ or Rust but I find Zig to be very interesting. I’d love to know more about arenas used for memory management.
I’d also love to know how they handle ownership of memory. In any sufficiently large, threaded, application, memory ownership always becomes an issue. I wonder if arenas help with that? It seems like they would have the same problem as C or C++ memory allocations. Then again, I have no idea what modern C++ has done for memory management, if anything?
Finally got a little snow. ❄️
I had coffee with my daughter this morning.
She turned me into a bear. 🐻
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Happy Thanksgiving weekend! I hope y’all were able to spend some time with friends and family around the dinner table eating way too much food and more pie than should be legal. I know I certainly did. We had a small gathering. Just Kim and I and our youngest daughter and her partner. Simple but very enjoyable. 🦃🥧
As for work. We hit a major milestone. The app we’ve toiled over, our Ship of Theseus, has reached completion! We’ve gone from the creation of a hybrid native/React Native application to a fully React Native application and it’s been approved in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store! 🥳 It was a tremendous amount of work and the team has performed beautifully! Congratulations to all involved!
The App will be released in early December. I’m so excited!
Amazon’s 14,000-plus layoffs announcedlast month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers
I have a friend who was hit my this. He’s was a contractor there, but it still hit him, and I don’t think contractors are included in those numbers. It’s a real shame. If they really want to move faster they’d keep the devs and they could use LLMs to move faster. It’s just another tool. ❤️
Canva quietly dropped a bombshell at the launch of the company’s Johannesburg office on Tuesday: the design giant is seriously considering porting its Affinity creative software to Linux.
I know a lot of folks are upset by the Affinity acquisition but I really like this idea!
I’m seeing a lot of chatter from folks about switching to Linux (probably won’t happen) and having major apps like Affinity on their platform would be extremely helpful to adoption.
As I understand it Windows 11 is not so great, which is a real shame because it has a very nice underpinning.
Despite having their own advantages and disadvantages, inline four-cylinder engines have come a long way, going from being efficient commuter motors to performance champions.
I have to admit I love the roar of race cars, from NASCAR to F1 to Indy Car to World Rally Championship. Hearing, smelling, and watching fast cars perform at the top of their game is thrilling.
Hearing that a four cylinder engine can produce as much power as a V8 is great for internal combustion cars, but we need to stop making them for the general population. They need to become speciality items. We need to make EV’s the everyday car, affordable to all socioeconomic classes. 🚙
Zig and Qt make for a surprisingly effective combination for cross platform GUI development.
Zig may not be completely memory safe — which is kind of a shame — but it’s still a great choice for good old C and C++ developers.
The article is a good read and Zig looks to be a very good choice for cross platform development.
I’ll be using Swift for the Windows version of Stream sometime in the next 10 years. 🤣
Nothing manmade has reached further from Earth than the Voyager series of spacecraft. Hurtling away from the sun at 38,000 miles an hour, the duo have now traveled over 12 billion miles, with Voyager 1 set to be a light-day from Earth by the end of this month.
It’s still about a year away, but Voyager — perhaps V’Ger for you Trekkies — is amazing feat of science and engineering.
Raymond Chen • The Old New Thing
A customer reported that their program encountered rendering problems when they created elements that were a half billion pixels tall, and they wondered why this was happening.
Raymon Chen is a national treasure. He works on the wildest problems and can you imagine hearing that someone wants to display something a half billion pixels tall? 😳
To be a professional long snapper is to have your worth measured by maybe a half-dozen plays every week. A pass-fail exam each time for a brotherhood of perfectionists. But the job is also a quest. Do it well enough, and there is stability and longevity in a game not noted for either. There is general health, or better odds for it. There are multimillion-dollar contracts that buy a lot of freedom when you’re done.
True story. When my brother was in his senior year of high school he was contacted by a coach from the Denver Broncos. They’d seen his film as a long snapper and wanted him to attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and continue long snapping under the tutelage of a coach there so they could perhaps draft him when he graduated. Ultimately he took a different path because he loved chemistry and eventually earned his Pharm.D at University of California San Francisco, but he wonders what would’ve happened if he’d gone the football route. 😀
It’s another Monday morning, sitting down at the computer. And I see a stack of alerts from the last hour of packages showing signs of malware in our triage queue. Having not yet finished my first cup of coffee, I see Shai Hulud indicators. Yikes, surely that’s a false positive? Nope, welcome to Monday, Shai Hulud struck again. Strap in.
Ugh. The npm community has some big fish to fry. They have to solve this problem. You can’t have folks using your package manager, used by who knows how many developers, as a virus factory. 🦠
Given how many internet conspiracies are actively harmful to our social fabric, it’s always heartening to see one that’s slightly lower stakes. How about: Timothée Chalamet, A-lister, our swaggy Paul Atreides and star of the upcoming Marty Supreme, is secretly EsDeeKid, a viral rapper from Liverpool, whose songs have been climbing into the top 20 of the UK singles chart in recent weeks.
When I read this I just smiled. How cool would it be if this is true and nobody ever proves it. 😆
I really like seeing the occasional anonymous band pop up. My favorite being Sleep Token.
Work Note: Stream for Mac
I managed to break the splitter on the right side of the middle column last time I worked on Stream. How? I have no idea what I did to break it. After beating my head against the wall for a half hour I finally found it. I’d set the width of the rightmost column to a fixed value. Duh! Don’t do that if you want things to automagically resize. Fixed. ✅
I need to sit down and read about state management with SwiftUI because it’s clear to me I’m too stupid to use it. 😄
I want to do what I though was a simple thing. I just want to hide, or change the background color of, my read/unread dot. The iPhone app just updates a value in a view model to be true or false and the UI is updated, easy peasy. It’s using UIKit instead of SwiftUI so it’s something I’m very familiar with.
Is it that easy in SwiftUI? Probably, but I don’t currently understand how to change a simple boolean value and convince the UI to refresh itself. I thought, like a big dummy, that I could make a boolean value on the View, decorate it with @State, and by calling toggle() on it, it would cuase the UI to update. Nope. Didn’t work. 😳
I’ve tried a few things to make it happen and it’s obvious I don’t understand how to do it. So… it’s time to go sit down and read how to do it. The View I’m trying to update is hosted in an NSHostingView and I can’t imagine that has anything to do with it? Do I need to using @Binding and @State together in a way I haven’t tried? Or, perhaps, I need use something completely different. ❌
Pretty big fail on my part today. Which is pretty frustrating. I have such little time to work on it that I need to have productive days. Failure is part of the process. I’ll figure it out and be better for it.
I guess I did manage to fix a bug. That’s a good thing. Just not enough.
Time to go home and make a Turkey sandwich. 🦃
Dave Winer on his upcoming commenting system
The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don’t have to “go” to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.
I’m not the brightest bulb in the box but I’m extremely curious to know how Dave is going to pull this all together. I’d wager to be that RSS is at the center of it, but how? 🤔
Excited to see what he’s putting together and understand how I can do this with my blog. Knowing how Manton – the author of Micro.blog – operates he’ll adopt this set of protocols or files or whatever Dave comes up with. It will be very nice to have for a lot of folks and to see how it interoperates with whatever Dave is building.
Feature request for Manton when/if he supports this. Please add a special post type to themes so we can choose to put them on the front page of our blog or, perhaps, add a way to keep them in a special place like you do with old Twitter posts? Maybe? 🤔 Or, perhaps do something really cool with the template so there is a connection established on the page with a reference back to the original post. I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this, but Silvio Rizzi did a great job with Reeder.
My Home Desk Setup
Does anyone ever take honest pictures of their desk setup? Seriously. They’re alway super clean and uncluttered.
Mine? Mine is a mess, all the time. With random trinkets and junk all over the place.
I moved one item before taking this picture because it had my address on it. Other than that, this is how it looks most days.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Pretty typical week. We have our granddaughter this weekend so I’ll be exhausted by Monday morning, just in time to go back to work. 😆
Yes, of course having her with us is total joy!
After nearly 10 years, I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit.
I’m thankful for all the work Eugen has done for social networking and Mastodon in particular.
Having him around, I believe, will be good for the direction of Mastodon.
All the best, Eugen! ❤️
Over the past six months, we have been working on a Visual Studio Code extension to assist in the development of Vapor applications. Let’s explore its features and how it can enhance your development experience.
I wonder if I should install this plugin? I’ve never done any backend development with Swift but if I did I imagine I’d use Vapor?
Also, I’m still surprised by how many people rely on Visual Studio Code daily. It seems the default and go to editor for web and React Native developers, along with so many others. It’s cross platform and super extensible, no wonder it’s so popular. I have a Linux dev nerd friend who was a huge emacs fan. He switched to Visual Studio Code for all of his C++ dev needs and loves it. When he went from Linux to Mac he kept the same setup. That’s attractive for folks who like it.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai • TechCrunch
DoorDash disclosed a data breach that exposed the personal information of an unspecified number of users, which included names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses.
The article also reports that DoorDash said “No sensitive information” was leaked. 😳 How can DoorDash say that with a straight face?
William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele • Apple Insider
For almost two decades, the Mac Probounced between coveted and beloved, to derided and forgotten. This isn’t the first time this has been said, but now it seems like the reign of the Mac Pro is finally over.
We all know our favorite Mac writer, podcaster, and developer, John Siracusa, is not excited for this move but on the latest ATP episode he shared that he expected it. Sorry, John.
I still think someone should take an old Trashcan Mac Pro and soup it up with upgraded innards. Like turning an old car into a hot rod.
Dave Winer has been updating the web page about Markdown in RSS. This is an RSS extension that adds source:markdownelements to your feed. Micro.blog supports this by default for all blogs.
At some point I’d like to support this in Stream, I think. That’s still a ways down the road as Stream for Mac still needs a lot of love before I can think about supporting it.
Verizon’s new CEO is planning to cut about 15,000 jobs in the U.S. telecommunications company’s largest ever layoffs, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday, outlining some of the executive’s first efforts to restructure in the face of rising competition.
And, here we go. More big layoffs in the tech sector. It’s so rough out there for tech jobs at the moment and I’m so happy I still have WillowTree.
The Financial Times reports that Apple has stepped up its preparations for the handover of the CEO role from Tim Cook. Here are the details.
A lot of the Apple community is looking forward to this transition. Tim Cook’s foray into Trump Worship was definitely the final straw for a lot of people.
MIT engineers have developed a flexible drug-delivery patch that can be placed on the heart after a heart attack to help promote healing and regeneration of cardiac tissue.
This is extremely cool and the type of thing my brother is into. As a Chemistry undergrad he was working on drug delivery systems using plastics. That was, geeze, almost forty years ago. We’ve come a long way and need research like that performed at our universities.
Henri Gendreau • Roanoke Rambler
Nationwide, data center operators including Google have tried to keep secret the amount of water projects could use. In Virginia, Ciaffone’s ruling appears to be the first time that a court has weighed in on whether such information can rightfully be withheld under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of case law. But hers may not be the final word.
Being a native Californian I understand, deeply, the importance of water. Here in Virginia it falls from the sky like some kind of magic but in California it’s very rare and much needed.
It’s a precious resource for the survival of the human race. Corporations using it willy-nilly to cool data centers sounds dumb when it’s difficult to come by.
Work Note: Stream for Mac
Another slow start to the day. I’ve hit a point in my todo list of items I don’t want to do. 😄 That’s always a good sign. It means I’m getting to the end of what I’d like to do to get a 1.0 out the door.
Today I covered three things.
J and K Navigation
I like the way Reeder and Unread use the J and K keys to navigate between feed items, so I added that. I need to figure out if I want to add it to blog navigation as well.
Persist and Restore Window Positions
This was a lot easier than I expected! Thank you Interface Builder! I was able to set a couple properties and it’s taken care of for me.
BUG: Fix Feed Item Refresh
I had an ugly bug that would cause the feed items table view to not refresh properly. I was final able to find the set of properties I needed to tweak to make this do what I wanted. Now the middle column — feed items — now updates properly. Bug squashed.
What Next?
Well, I still have a list of things I’d like to do and I need to work on polishing up how the app feels. When redrawing feed item cells the associated favicon image doesn’t fill in as quickly as I’d like. I’ll just cache all of them so hopefully we won’t have that issue any longer.
I also added a new container type for blog display — leftmost column — so I can add static type items in the column. I need at least to column headers; Articles and Subscriptions, so I can have an All Articles item and have all of the blogs display under Subscriptions for a bit of separation. The All Articles item will behave the same way as Cmd+A and display all feed items mixed together in the middle column. It’s also where I’ll place the items saved to “Read Later” but that may not be a 1.0 item, we’ll see how it goes.
I also need to make sure to get my Action Extension “Subscribe in Stream” working on the Mac so folks will be able to subscribe right from Safari.
Oh, one other annoying thing. I created a separate target for the Mac build and I had to name it Stream-macOS because Xcode wouldn’t let me have two Stream Targets. I suspect this was a mistake and to fix it I’ll have to add a new Target to the existing Target. I know, that may sound weird, but there is a way to do it and I didn’t know about it until I read up on it today. That will be a real pain in the butt to fix because of file inclusion per target. Ack! Not looking forward to that! 🤣
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Allergies. Ugh. That’s been my week. It wasn’t a horrible week. I’m just tired. Now, who wants to blow the leaves out of our yard today! 🍂
I hope you enjoy the linkage.
Chris Espinosa, who wrote the first Macintosh calculator app and still works at Apple as its longest-serving employee, found a creative way around Steve’s never-ending critiques in what must be one of the best ever examples of managing upwards
So smart! I’ll bet Jobs was extremely happy to be able to sit there and tweak to his hearts content.
Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework designed to solve the fundamental problem of cross-platform development: velocity vs. runtime performance. For 8 years, it has powered a large portion of Snap’s production apps.
I think this is super interesting and I need to spend a bit of time understanding it better.
I really like that it has hot loading, like React Native, and you can use the debugger! 😍 That is my biggest gripe with React Native development, lack of proper debugging support in the IDE.
Yesterday, Apple unveiled what seems unlikely to be their newest hit product, the iPhone Pocket. Produced in collaboration with the Issey Miyake design studio, this goofy accessory features “a singular 3D-knitted construction designed to fit any iPhone”. It will also hold “all pocketable items”, I suppose in the same way that a bag will hold all baggable items.
You have to visit Paul’s site! 🤣 The picture accompanying this post is worth a thousand words.
John Hughes is responsible for the greatest Thanksgiving movie of all time, 1987’s poignant Planes, Trains & Automobiles. This Steve Martin and John Candy-led classic has become a perennial and a movie tons of folks have probably been revisiting this week. However, about four years later, in 1991, John Hughes made another Thanksgiving movie in the same vein, Dutch. Despite being a pretty solid movie with a very recognizable cast, it’s a hard movie to track down nowadays. And, with Thanksgiving not too far away that’s a damn shame!
I’ve never seen Dutch but it’s on my list. I’ve also never seen Uncle Buck so it’s on the list too!
There are two movies I think of as Thanksgiving movies. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is a classic and the other is Four Brothers but only because the events in the movie happen at Thanksgiving time.
Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving movie?
Mayank Parmar • Windows Latest
WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a ‘major’ upgrade, and you’re probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is cooked, and it’s back to being absolute garbage in terms of performance.
Let’s just use websites. What benefit does a dedicated wrapper around a website actually give the user? An icon on the desktop? You can make a PWA using Edge, why not do that?
I like native desktop apps.
Shopify, which on Oct. 20 penned the first installment of its brand-new Substack newsletter, dubbed “In Stock.”
No, no, no. Y’all need to stop using Substack. Why centralize your business in the Nazi Bar? I don’t get it.
The greatest thing about using an RSS reader is the ability to “mark all as read,” walk away, and not get another update until you hit the refresh button. Seriously, if you haven’t tried it, then you haven’t lived.
There are many wonderful benefits to using RSS. Find a reader and try it for yourself.
Did I mention I make one called Stream? 😃
Politics
My reason is simple: I no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom. President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment. This is contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench. The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out. Silence, for me, is now intolerable.
I kind of wish more justices would do something like this but we need them on the bench to defend democracy.
It was brave of Judge Wolf to walk away so he could share his feelings.
