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Apple Newsroom: Starting today, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging begins rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can’t be r...

Remember Desktop Tower Defense? I played it for a bit this weekend and it’s still great fun. One of the very best games from the Flash era.

Taken: this is a web page that shows how much data your browser can collect that websites can use to “fingerprint” your device, even without cookies. “It identified your device with enough specificity to distinguish it from most others on the internet.”

"Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford."

Samsung phones took spots 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. The one phone not from Apple or Samsung in the top 10 was the Xiaomi Redmi A5 at #10. As I always say, take these numbers with a grain of salt, but according to Counterpoint, the bestselling phones, in order, are:

1. iPhone 17
2. iPhone 17 Pro Max
3. iPhone 17 Pro

And Apple’s phone in spot #6 was not the iPhone Air, alas, but the year-old iPhone 16.

(Via Horace Dediu.)

Link: appleworld.today/2026/05/apples-iphone-17-was-the-worlds…

In this episode, I react to the NYT music critics defending their terrible list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Full NYT Video Here: https://youtu.be/Hc1ARmtVwFg?si=50RWWLYCsNi-J9DZ My Beato Club supporters: Justin Scott Terence Mark Jason Murray Lucienne Kilpatrick Alexander Young Jason Wagner Todd Ladner Rob Kline Nicholas Long Tim Benson Leonardo Martins da Costa Rodrigues Eddie Perez David Solomon MICHAEL JOYCE Stephen Stubbs colin stead Jonathan Wentworth-Linton Patrick Payne MATTHEW KARIS Matthew Barouch Shaun Samuels Danny Kurywchak Gregory Reedy Sean Coleman Alexander Verbitskiy CL Turner Jason Pappafotis John Fulford Margaret Carno Robert C David M Combs Eric Flatt Reto Spoerli Herr Moritz Adam Monte St. Johns Jon Beezley Peter DeVault Eric Nabstedt Eric Beggs Rich Germano Brian Bloom Peter Pillitteri Piush Dahal Toby Guidry

Newest camera doesn't necessarily equal the nicest photo MKBHD Merch: http://shop.MKBHD.com Every iPhone in daylight: https://youtube.com/shorts/jru9Gsz3kJY Every iPhone in low light: https://youtube.com/shorts/pvjivZ6C6CA Every Samsung phone: https://youtube.com/shorts/as_NEJAP8ew Every Google phone: https://youtube.com/shorts/s3DrGkDvgNw Apps with alternate processing: Halide: https://halide.cam/ MotionCam: https://www.motioncamapp.com/ Playlist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5 ~ http://twitter.com/MKBHD http://instagram.com/MKBHD http://facebook.com/MKBHD

Seán Doran, who I’ve featured here many times before for his remastered astronomy photos & videos, has taken photographs captured by a Japanese weather satellite of Typhoon Sinlaku in April 2026 and “repaired, remastered and transformed” the images into this breathtaking 4K video.

The beauty of the storm as seen from above belies its fury and destructiveness. Sinlaku was “strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere” since 2021 and the strongest overall storm so far in 2026. The Mariana Islands, Guam, and Micronesia all suffered widespread damage and the storm has claimed 17 lives so far.

Tags: hurricanes · mesmerizing · satellite imagery · Sean Doran · video · weather

Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwi...

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles. I particularly liked his use of the term "Zo...

TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script Kim_Bruning on Hacker News: But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...] This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with LLM. Here's the simples...

Along with collaborator Betty Schöner, Brunetti travels around the continent in a firetruck that has been converted to a photo lab.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Markus Brunetti’s Monumental Photos Venerate European Ecclesiastical Landmarks appeared first on Colossal.

Interesting thread about why rural towns don’t vote blue: they don’t have to because small towns “actually operate very similarly to the ‘socialist agenda’ they pretend to be so afraid of” and “they’ve already been having to take of their own…”

Apple stopped selling the Power Mac G5 (with space) in August 2006, so I’m not sure how much they care about Kraft using “PowerMac” (sans space) as a trademark for protein-enhanced macaroni and cheese. (I feel like there’s got to be a joke to be made here about a “cheese grater”...)

Link: kraftheinz.com/kraft-mac-and-cheese/products/00021000086856…

Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg over the weekend: Though the Mac software introduced the same Liquid Glass interface seen in iOS 26, the design language hasn’t translated as smoothly to the larger displays and different input methods of desktops and...

Aardman’s official Wallace & Gromit YouTube channel is livestreaming what appears to be the four shorts featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Matter of Loaf or Death.

I can’t find any further information about the stream — if those are the only animations that are available, if any of the movies are included, how long the stream will be up. But I’m watching The Wrong Trousers right now and eating a bit of cheese, so all is right with the world.

Tags: Aardman Animations · animation · stop motion · video · Wallace and Gromit

People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions. “We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated.”

Anyone of any age can stop by the Grandma Stand in New York’s Central Park to shoot the breeze with a grandmother. The concept has spread around the US and is now the subject of an hour-long documentary on PBS.

At a time when the lack of connection is epidemic, wise witty grandmas sit behind a lemonade-like stand, offering life lessons to passersby in NYC’s Central Park. We see 20 diverse people candidly share their feelings. “Just a little love, a little talking. She’s speaking to my soul,” said a visitor. This film shows how a brief encounter has a strong impact and gives us insight into our own lives.

You can watch the complete documentary on the PBS site (like US-only). (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)

Tags: Grandma Stand · PBS · video

Where are the public benches on the internet? “Like cities that have prioritized cars, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes.”