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Hello dear readers. Daring Fireball has been silent for the last week. I realize how unusual it is for the site to go un-updated any week of the year, let alone this particular week of the year. I’m so sorry about that, and also sorry about not being able to write this note to you sooner.

I have been dealing with — and working through — a very personal situation for the past week. It’s OK. I’m going to be OK. But it has kept me offline for some time. Given the one-man nature of this site, that has meant that nothing has been published.

I look forward to getting back to writing very soon. I can feel it: I will be back soon. I’m itching to go. I mean, jiminy, it’s new iPhones week. But it’ll be a few more days before I get those reviews out. In the meantime, I so profoundly appreciate your patience and understanding.

Your faithful correspondent,
John Gruber

Gear Brands With a Lifetime Warranty like Darn Tough Vermont, Osprey, Orvis, Patagonia, and Timbuk2.

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A short documentary with the recorded sounds of a melting glacier.

When you look at this gigantic mass of ice, it’s hard to get a personal relationship to it. So we wanted to document this landscape to give us an idea of what it sounds like inside a glacier. There is also the sadness because you know that all these sounds are disappearing right now. Of course, melting is something natural for glaciers, but the problem is that nothing new is coming back.

Tags: climate crisis · sound · video

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In the 1920s, a Russian biologist studying onion roots made a surprising discovery: underground, down in the darkness, it seemed like the cells inside the onion roots were making their own … light.  The “onion root experiment” went on to become something of a cult class...

A 1965 television interview with a 107-year-old Irish farmer (born in 1858) on all the changes he’s seen during his life. Q: “What would you say was the biggest change?” A: “Well, machinery.”

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The story of Thomalind and Priscilla is 300 years in the making and brings listeners to Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone.  

READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bunce-island

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The defining experience of fascism is “getting yelled at by dumbasses”.

Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late '80s, early '90s.

— Steve Jobs, 1984 interview with Access Magazine (via)

Tags: agent-definitions, steve-jobs, computer-history

The 2025 Audubon Photography Awards Emphasize Epic and Endangered Migrations. I love the shot of the acorn woodpecker.

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How the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz Survived the Death Camps. “I have been gripped by a need to understand more not only about the women in the Auschwitz orchestra…but also what hearing music in this inferno meant to the other prisoners.”

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Of Oz the Wizard is the entire Wizard of Oz movie presented in alphabetical order by dialogue. So it starts with all the scenes where Dorothy and the gang say “a”, “aaiee”, “along”, and proceeds through “you’re” and “zipper”. Even the words on each of the title cards are s...

I've noticed something interesting over the past few weeks: I've started using the term "agent" in conversations where I don't feel the need to then define it, roll my eyes or wrap it in scare quotes. This is a big piece of personal character development for me! Moving forwa...

Gina Trapani writes about taking a sabbatical. “Take afternoon naps. Bigger things like foster a box of 6 kittens, do a 10-day silent retreat, quit coffee, start lifting, train for a triathlon, take vacations to explore…”

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This sounds like a cool project: Pocket Fiche is a pocket-sized microscope that comes with a ultra-high resolution, nano-fabricated image. “Think of Pocket Fiche as the Earth bound version of the Voyager golden record.”

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Some unusual rocks observed by NASA’s Perseverance rover “could be the clearest signs of life ever found” on Mars.

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Hey folks, I know there’s a lot going on these days, but I wanted to update you on a few things I’ve been doing for the site lately. Alright, looking through my Git commits from the last couple of months: I already told you about the Rolodex. Hoping to provide access to th...

Let’s be clear about what just happened: Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent late-night comedian, was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn’t like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up.

When you install a PWA on iOS (and iPadOS) via “Add to Home Screen”, you can make the status bar – i.e. the area at the top around the notch/dynamic island – transparent yet blurry (so that you can still read its infos like the time or battery status).

Man pulls off daring scuba heist of Disney paddleboat restaurant, netting $10K-$20K before successfully escaping into the water from whence he came.

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