FeedCity

Alan Dye is leaving Apple for Meta, with Stephen Lemay taking over design. Nice that he goes back to 1990s Apple. I’m not sure what Apple needs, but I don’t think looking outside the company would help.

Wednesday session

Jason Fried blogging about the Fizzy launch, which is free as open source or $20/month hosted:

If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever. Have a great idea? Submit a PR to contribute to the code base and improve the product for everyone.

37signals is very opinionated, so I wonder if too many PRs will clash with how they usually grow a product.

My mind boggles at the thought of using a generative tool based on a large language model to do any kind of qualatitive user research, so every single thing that Gregg says here makes complete sense to me.

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Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins

I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.

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I was out in the water yesterday while they were putting up and decorating the Christmas tree in funky Ocean Beach and as usual it leans a bit; in the background, waves crash into the (retired, long story) pier. Thanks Ocean Beach Community Foundation for arboreal joy! it leans a bit decorating with a cherry...

Quick video demo of a new feature to change the poster frame of a video you’ve uploaded. Testing with a Mickey Mouse short that will go into the public domain in 2026, the first appearance of Pluto, so I’m a few weeks early.

The options we pass to FFmpeg in a variety of cases is now so complicated that I can’t really understand or edit it without AI.

They should make a version of bash on Linux that also accepts ChatGPT commands. As always they is someone other than me.

The nightly emails didn't go out last night. It was easy to fix, a server needed to be rebooted. The problems cascaded from there, long story, but in the end I had to move one of my virtual-virtual servers (two levels of virtuality) to another virtual server. Upgrading versions of Node is a tricky process that I have never mastered or understood, and every time it takes almost a full day to do it. Something I hope to someday be able to find the time to sort out. Not today, though -- I have a fun project planned out. Really looking forward to doing the work and seeing the result.

Though the stream didn’t work as we hoped, the recording of this year’s State of the Word, which in many ways was our best one yet, is up now.

To be honest, I’m really enjoying the waves in the past week. I said the other day: Many sessions result in rides that are better than any wave I’ve ever ridden. I’m not using the word “best.” I had a person ask me if I meant “best” with that awkward phrase. I don’t. “Best” has...

Today's song: Old Folks Boogie. Sooooo you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill.

There's a question going around in WordPressLand as to whether there are any RSS apps. Yes, of course there are. Have a look at daveverse, in the right margin. That's a feed reader. All the feeds I follow personally. When one of them updates they go to the top of the list. You can see the five most recent posts by clicking on the wedge next to the title, and from there, you can go to the website by clicking a link. That's available as a WordPress plug-in. It works.

I asked ChatGPT to write an email to Sam Altman for me. It's about a possible way to compete with Google.

Nick Heer blogs a little Siri + AI skepticism. It’s a good point, why do we keep expecting the next guy is going to fix this? I was just looking at my first post about Alexa from 10 years ago. That whole time, Siri hasn’t changed significantly that I can tell.

Tuesday session

Fiddlers three

Just noticed that the bottle of Dr. Pepper they gave me at the restaurant last night looks like a 20 oz bottle, but it’s 16.9 oz / 500 mL. Shrinkflation? Sort of makes sense to standardize on an even number like 500 mL for global distribution.

Anthropic acquires the JavaScript tool Bun. A quote from Mike Krieger:

Bun represents exactly the kind of technical excellence we want to bring into Anthropic.

Curious where they take this. Bun is our default for building the Micro.blog mobile apps. It’s good.