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Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS should be visible with the naked eye in the night sky tonight (Oct 9). “Astronomers are expecting the comet to be especially vivid, possibly rivaling the brightness of Jupiter in the night sky.”

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Many Tricks: Moom 4 is only available directly from Many Tricks; it is not available on the Mac App Store. If it were our choice, it would also be in the Mac App Store, but it’s not our choice. Why isn’t it in the Mac App Store? Because the Mac App Store does not allow ...

Zac Bowden, writing for Windows Central:

The Surface Duo 2 has just received its likely final security update, marking an end to Microsoft’s brief return to the smartphone market. The company originally launched Surface Duo 2 in October 2021, and promised to support the product with software updates for three years. Microsoft was only able to deliver one major Android version update in that time, a pitiful number for a $1,500 device.

It wasn’t that Microsoft was only able to deliver one major Android version update in 3 years. They’re Microsoft, for chrissakes. It’s that they could only be bothered to deliver one major upgrade. Commitment is vastly underestimated in the hardware game.

Link: windowscentral.com/phones/the-surface-duo-is-dead-microsoft…

Fun Halloween-themed teaser.

Link: sophiestication.com/NightOfTheLivingApp/

Zoë Schlanger writes about the potentially dangerous and incredibly powerful hurricane now bearing down on Florida’s Gulf Coast and how it’s been supercharged in several ways by climate change. As Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm ...

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac: According to multiple 9to5Mac readers and reports across social media, Home Depot has also recently started rolling out Apple Pay support. Home Depot has been a major Apple Pay holdout, resisting pressure from its customers to add supp...

The passwords generated by Apple Passwords consist of two-syllable gibberish words designed to be easier to input in non-optimal situations. “The syllables help them to be memorable briefly, but still not memorizable.”

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Mainstream journalists are clamoring for Harris to do more interviews, but these interviews haven’t been substantive. “Not only are these interviews not terribly valuable for the candidate; they’re not terribly valuable as journalism.”

Todd Heberlein: Cozy mysteries are a genre of crime fiction where the stories take place in small, socially intimate communities, and any violence is limited or happens offscreen. Yesterday, I experienced a “Cozy WWDC,” and it was wonderful! The event took place in an i...

Panic: Well, Google has a new set of policies that require apps that connect to Google Drive to go through expensive, time-consuming annual reviews, and this has made it extremely difficult for us to reasonably maintain Google Drive access. You may have seen iA Writer’s ...

Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, reporting for The New York Times, with the conspicuous absence of Maggie Haberman from that shared byline: Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on...

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors: The latest video of what could be a next-generation MacBook Pro was shared on YouTube Shorts today by Russian channel Romancev768, just one day after another Russian channel shared a similar video. The clip shows a box for a 14-inch ...

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

In the release notes for the sixth beta of the macOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Apple says that users aren’t going to see as many popups for apps they regularly use.

Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies. Users will see fewer dialogs if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.

Why in the world didn’t Apple take regular use of a screen-recording app into account all along?

Link: macrumors.com/2024/10/07/apple-screen-recording-popup…

I really liked this entertaining short film by Eric Kissack (editor & producer for The Good Place), in which a couple moving into a new apartment together discovers a previously unnoticed feature of their new space, which in turn…well, I don’t want to spoil anything. Just watch it.

Tags: Eric Kissack · this is a metaphor for something · video

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A look at Mozilla’s rebrand. “Mozilla’s new logo is a flag symbol built from the Mozilla M that comes to life to reveal the company’s iconic Tyrannosaurus Rex symbol and mascot, originally designed by Shepard Fairey.”

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The finalists of the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition have been announced, so if you need a laugh, here you go. There are so many “tag yourself” moments in these photos. You can check out all of the finalists here and vote for the People’s Choice Award until Oct 31. Tags: best of · best of 2024 · photography 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

From Kenji López-Alt, a list of potential red flags that he looks for when deciding to patronize restaurants. “I try to avoid spending my money at establishments where that money may end up in the hands of people who are abusive or exploitative.”

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Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing, an investigation of fake objects. “Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing.”

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Out today from National Geographic is Infinite Cosmos, a gorgeous-looking book by Ethan Siegel (intro by Brian Greene). It’s about the history of the JWST, humanity’s biggest ever space telescope, a machine that allows us to peer deeper & clearer into the universe than...