FeedCity

Thursday session

We’ve got the track list for U2’s next album, coming out in November, including this surprise:

The song connecting the album and two EPs is the final track on the new album, ‘Torn’, a duet between Bono and the late, great Dolly Parton, in what has sadly turned out to be her last recorded vocal performance.

Screenshot of the redesigned theme editor for Micro.blog going live now. It’s better in pretty much every way. Nicer folder and file list, brand new syntax highlighting editor with support for Hugo and HTML, and other improvements.

Bad wi-fi today, so I’m tethering, but bad cell signal too… So much of my work depends on the web, even simple coding and testing slows to a crawl. I’m usually spoiled. It’s a weird disconnect when internet in downtown Austin is worse than it was via Starlink in the middle of the ocean.

New example script, shows how to build an RSS feed from a single Mastodon user's account. This is mainly to show past Frontier users how the new product is progressing, not released yet.

There’s a bug fix update to the OutPost beta for Mac. It’s shaping up to be a nice Micropub client. Good app to have around for Micro.blog blogs.

A couple more thoughts on Meta Connect: Mark Zuckerberg seems pretty happy with the company’s position right now. For the moment, they are ahead of everyone on glasses and personal agents. Meta does a lot, yet in a way they are more focused than OpenAI because Meta doesn’t need to compete on coding.

It was the autumnal equinox a few days ago. For a moment our planet was balanced perfectly, with everyone experience twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness. Here in the northern hemisphere, the days will get shorter and the nights will get longer until the win...

Mark Zuckerberg has a short thread on, uhm, Threads that highlights the announcements from Meta Connect today. The no-video glasses look good, and the Muse Charm is fun. I just wish another company was shipping this stuff.

John Gruber linked to this iPhone 4 Antennagate Q&A and it really is extraordinary. A look back into an old version of Apple, sitting somewhere between the classic Mac days of the 1990s and today’s Apple.

Usually I’m so busy chatting and marveling when I visit Helmut that I totally forget to take a few photos. Fortunately someone stopped in for some ribbon on a Hermes yesterday, so I took a moment to document some of the density of typewriters in Helmut’s spectacular typewriter shop. I only got photos of about … Continue reading A visit to Helmut Schulze at Rees Electronics/Star Typewriter

Unsung heroes of the web -- librarians.

The early web was just this incredible new tool that no one knew yet how it would be used and what it would be used for.

The first Yahoo was a card catalog.

Netscape had a What's New page with links to interesting stuff.

apple.com was a Unix box under a librarian's desk. They started adding stuff that was useful to users and developers. No business model, just the librarian approach to information. Circulate it.

I think if a new web is to be born, it's because it's again a possibility with the advent of AI.

Listen to librarians, they probably have some good ideas of where to start.

Just created a new test account at mastodon.social for bullmancuso using Frontier. Claude wrote the glue scripts table. Loaded it at system.verbs.apps.Mastodon. I also asked Claude to write a script that builds an RSS feed for davew, my Mastodon account. And it worked. That's a much better feed than what Masto itself produces. It won't be updated at that location so there's no point in subscribing. But wow, this is coming together. If Frontier had been around for all these years you can be sure it would do Mastodon integration pretty well.

On Monday I offered free advice for Toni Schneider, the new CEO at Bluesky. I'm sure everyone is telling him what to do, and as a blogger it's my responsibility to relay my own two cents. I want us all to come together no matter what protocol you're using. We've been waiting for a web to form in the social space. We could do it now, but Bluesky has to consolidate. Note that I said we, not they.

It's been 2.5 months since RSS.chat was introduced. I've been so immersed in Frontier that, as I look back, all this feels fresh to me. I want all text boxes to be equal and to be chained together in as many ways as we can think of, users and developers. Relational writing. I...

It's great to own your own home. The house I'm living in now is the third I've owned. Now I wish for the carefree existence of being a renter because we turned the heat on last night, too cold -- only to find out some animal must've crawled into the pipes and died there. Lovely. Oh to have my old apartment in Manhattan. Sometimes I dream about that.

Another trailer for Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything. Amazing. I don’t know what kind of story this is going to tell, but it’s obviously going to be a totally different kind of documentary.

First trailer for Ray Gunn is out. Brad Bird had been wanting to make this film for decades. Can’t believe it’s actually happening.

Still settling in to what AI models I should be using. Last month, I was happy with GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) and fast mode all the time. Astra blew that up because it’s just more expensive. I think GPT-6 Sol (high) is the right balance for my usage.