FeedCity: Featured

Daring Fireball
25 Oct 18:27 • John Gruber

iPhone Portrait Mode, 10 Years In

x.com/johnnie/status/2114007844605612167

Speaking of Johnnie Manzari, he wrote a post yesterday marking the 10 year anniversary of Portrait Mode: Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach fe...

kottke.org
25 Oct 14:12 • Jason Kottke

The Tiny Computers app lets you play with old computers...

The Tiny Computers app lets you play with old computers on the iPhone Duo. Ten machines included: “Macintosh, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga 500, Windows 95, ThinkPad, iMac G3, iBook G3, PowerBook G4 and Windows XP.” XP even crashes sometimes. Love this.

Rick Beato
25 Oct 09:34

Matchbox Twenty on the mistake at the beginning of “Bent”

APOD Basic
25 Oct 09:24

Dark Matter in a Simulated Universe

Explanation: Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and ho...

Daring Fireball
24 Oct 22:42 • John Gruber

Nicole Nguyen’s Duo Review for the WSJ

wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/iphone-duo-review-cafcbbe7?st=GaYVMf

Nicole Nguyen (also with a 5-minute video), writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Every time I used the Duo in phone mode, one-handed, I felt its heft. It’s wider and thicker than a Pro iPhone — and heavier, even compared with competing foldables. My hand actu...

Daring Fireball
24 Oct 22:12 • John Gruber

Reuters and the WSJ on the Duo Launch

reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/apple-bets-iphone-duo-can-remake-foldable-market-sales-begin-2026-10-22/

Aditya Soni, Christine Chen, and Will Russell, reporting Friday for Reuters: CEO Ternus played greeter at a store in Austin, Texas, throwing open the doors and high-fiving customers as they streamed in, a video posted on X by CBS Austin showed. A known car enthusiast, T...

Daring Fireball
24 Oct 21:18 • John Gruber

Marion Barry Meets the iPhone Duo

theverge.com/tech/1017623/iphone-duo-broken-cracked-screen

Jay Peters, The Verge:

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display.

This crack problem doesn’t seem to be widespread, but it’s seemingly more than a handful.

Link: theverge.com/tech/1017623/iphone-duo-broken-cracked-screen

Daring Fireball
24 Oct 20:48 • John Gruber

MKBHD’s Duo Review

youtu.be/ESABTN4VtrA

Marques Brownlee thinks the lack of Face ID will be the biggest gripe. I agree. And I love his central framing for the review: that the Duo is extremely polished around the edges (figuratively, but also true literally) but rough in the middle. But he spends more time gripin...

Daring Fireball
24 Oct 19:24 • John Gruber

Tim Pan’s iPhone Duo Review

youtube.com/watch?v=8pCccpKjjos

I hadn’t heard of Tim Pan or Mediastorm until running across his 24-minute video review of the Duo. It’s a good and fair review, but what struck me are the rather astonishing production values. Amongst other things, they stress-tested the hinge with an industrial robot by op...

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
24 Oct 18:49

What If We Cool Down the Sun?

The sunlight and the heat coming from Sun are essential for nearly all of life on Earth. So, what would happen if we cool down our star by 30%? #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshorts #science #sun #astrophysics Sources & further reading: h...

Daring Fireball
24 Oct 16:06 • John Gruber

Apple Built a Photo-Realistic Functional Original iPod for Apple Music’s 404 Page

music.apple.com/404

It seems like this amazing Easter egg only launched yesterday, to celebrate the original iPod’s 25th anniversary. Exquisitely well done. More like this, please.

Link: music.apple.com/404

Simon Willison's Weblog
24 Oct 15:48

battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map

Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI pl...

Daring Fireball
24 Oct 15:09 • John Gruber

Chan Karunamuni on the Duo’s Open/Close Translucent Transition

x.com/chan_k/status/2113622379050246243

Chan Karunamuni, human interface designer at Apple, on X: iPhone Duo is here! Excited to have worked on the design of our open/close transition. It’s designed to make the two displays feel like one seamless experience by perceptually bending the focal plane, not the cont...

Rick Beato
24 Oct 09:40

I've Never Seen The Guitar Played Like This

In this interview Slovak guitarist David Kollar demonstrates his unique guitar style. He shows me how he creates other worldly sonic textures using a mixture of unconventional techniques and digital manipulation. Check out more of David's work: https://www.davidkollar.com/ ...

APOD Basic
24 Oct 04:21

Rosetta's Selfie

Explanation: This Rosetta spacecraft selfie was snapped on October 7th, 2014. At the time the comet-chasing spacecraft was about 472 million kilometers from planet Earth, but only 16 kilometers from the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Looming beyond the spacecraf...

xkcd.com
24 Oct 01:12

Forms of Water

Simon Willison's Weblog
23 Oct 23:45

Quick Study

Tool: Quick Study

Prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High:

Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush

See also my previous experiment getting Claude Fable to simulate a watercolor illustration with P5.js.

Quick Study uses Sobel edge detection, with no external libraries beyond Google Fonts.

Tags: tools

Mars For The Rest of Us
23 Oct 22:24 • Maciej Cegłowski

An Apology to Readers

I’m late late late

Simone Giertz
23 Oct 21:12

I had this idea on a trip

October 12, 2026

Citation Needed
23 Oct 20:27 • Molly White

On Meidas Defense: cryptocurrency, sanctions, and Trump quid pro quo

Last week I joined Joe Plenzler on the Meidas Defense podcast to talk about crypto. Meidas Defense is the MeidasTouch Network’s national security show, so we spent more time than I usually do on crypto as a geopolitical problem, in addition to a consumer protection one. The full